For most of history, learning a trade meant working alongside someone who already knew it. College as the assumed next step after high school is a much newer, much more specific arrangement.
Eight hours of work, eight of leisure, eight of rest. It sounds like it was carefully designed for human wellbeing. It was actually the result of over a century of fighting, and it had almost nothing to do with what's healthy for you.
Money didn't replace simple trading. It solved something much more specific: the problem of trusting strangers. The part that came later — the idea that how much you have says something about who you are — that's the layer