A childhood belief about work

When I was in first school I started noticing that my friends in fourth year (9 years old, very grown-up!) would vanish over the summer and not be there when I came back in September. I asked one of the classroom helpers where they went; she said they were leaving the school. For another year and a half I believed that once you were nine years old you had to leave school and go to work... in my mind it was never normal office-type work either but something like mining or working in a factory full of smoke. Maybe in Victorian times I would have been almost right.