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Absence from school
May. 14th, 2016 07:00 amAnother matter in current British news is that of taking children out of school for holidays at times of year when they cost less. The whole debate is sounding grossly oversimplified and the interviews with parents on the news make for painful listening:
It sounds as if there is a lack of imagination or judgment on the part of the local councils. There is not some simple formula whereby days out of school equate to worse education. To begin with, examination performance is not the be-all and end-all of education. ( I put forward some examples )
Further, I wonder how much more educational school is than time with educated parents in other contexts. For secondary school and sixth form I attended a public (in the British sense) school and certainly did not feel that my time was wasted. However, with Miranda and Benjamin at different state schools, when we ask them about their day, I am often disappointed by how much of their time appears to be wasted from the point of view of their own education, more so even than one would expect from simply having to manage many children at once. ( school isn't an intensive educational experience ) Dawn and I between us are well-educated indeed and we make a point to try to pass plenty on: ( and examples of this abound ) Dawn and I are both very conscious of our responsibility to prepare our children for life as independent adults.
I should thus disagree strongly were the authorities to assume that time out of school is necessarily deleterious for children. I am struck by how such a view is emerging from a Conservative government: I would have thought that they would be much stronger on personal responsibility than
now we don't know what to do! we're so confused!(well, not quite in those words).
It sounds as if there is a lack of imagination or judgment on the part of the local councils. There is not some simple formula whereby days out of school equate to worse education. To begin with, examination performance is not the be-all and end-all of education. ( I put forward some examples )
Further, I wonder how much more educational school is than time with educated parents in other contexts. For secondary school and sixth form I attended a public (in the British sense) school and certainly did not feel that my time was wasted. However, with Miranda and Benjamin at different state schools, when we ask them about their day, I am often disappointed by how much of their time appears to be wasted from the point of view of their own education, more so even than one would expect from simply having to manage many children at once. ( school isn't an intensive educational experience ) Dawn and I between us are well-educated indeed and we make a point to try to pass plenty on: ( and examples of this abound ) Dawn and I are both very conscious of our responsibility to prepare our children for life as independent adults.
I should thus disagree strongly were the authorities to assume that time out of school is necessarily deleterious for children. I am struck by how such a view is emerging from a Conservative government: I would have thought that they would be much stronger on personal responsibility than
the state knows best. Parents do have a responsibility to ensure that their children are properly educated and, while I accept that a couple of weeks at a Disney theme park is very probably not the optimal alternative to school, I nonetheless propose that lack of school attendance is but a weak proxy for assessing how well parents fulfil their duty, one which might appeal to the lazy who daren't trust anybody's actual judgment. The whole debate makes me wonder what the country's attitude is to home-schooling: my guess now is that it might give the authorities the willies. In some respects I think that the religious fundamentalists do the US a great service in pushing for some choice in how their children are educated.
