mtbc | Absence from school

Another 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: 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 suspect that I got into Cambridge partly because of things like when they asked me to list conservation laws, I had got to conservation of baryon number before they stopped me: i.e. I was talking about plenty not taught in school. At that point I could have discussed topics like orbital hybridization even though it also wasn't on my A-level syllabus. Once actually at Cambridge, a significant reason why I didn't do excellently in those examinations is that I chose to use the available resources to learn other things, like how to use and run UNIX-like systems, rather outwith what was examinable, which stood me in good stead in every job I've since had. (My significant contact with academia since shows me how lucky I was to have evaded an academic career track.) I paid enough attention in a lot of courses to understand what they were about and to fill in the rest of the details myself when necessary: in real life I have been able to actually pick up those details from that general background by need, even though I didn't bother training myself to answer examination questions on them at the time. Similarly, this ongoing learning is how I was able to write at work yesterday about protein cleavage and complexes, splice variants in eukaryotes, etc,. despite having dropped biology after GCSE. Miranda's team sure didn't win the local round of the primary schools quiz on the strength of what she'd learned in school. What is useful to know, and brings success in work, is not solely dispensed by schools.

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. In Benjamin's school if the regular teacher is out and they have some substitute in from some other subject they don't even seem to make an attempt to give half a useful lesson. They spend a lot of time watching films (I think Zorro was one of this year's), waiting for classmates in some way (e.g., currently listening to everybody else's oral presentations), etc., and frankly not really learning much. Benjamin is getting enough downtime at school that he can get most of his homework finished off while there. Miranda is even spending a fair bit of time teaching the younger children things, like reading with them. I'm not saying that these activities are wholly valueless, by any means, but nor are many of the discussions we have with the children in our life with them. Dawn and I between us are well-educated indeed and we make a point to try to pass plenty on: just this past week I was explaining to Miranda everything from philosophical zombies to Italian plurals and have recently been trying to cover density with Benjamin in the context of general strategies for solving science problems (there are clues in the units!), given that physics so far at school appears to be leaving him wholly ignorant of density. When we do travel on holiday we try to include plenty that is educational, stopping at everywhere from Caerlaverock Castle to the Jenner Museum; places like Goonhilly remain on that list. Even grocery shopping affords opportunities to discuss everything from nutrition to laying out and presenting goods to increase sales and I try to include documentaries among our evening's television viewing: the BBC are a godsend there. We also keep an eye on what the children are supposed to know and are more than able to fill in gaps where necessary; indeed, in that effort, after due diligence I sometimes find myself having to correct what the teacher told them, with the caveat that their examiners might go with the teacher's view. (Some of these are I think a lies to children simplification that will be corrected later, but some are just plain wrong.) 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.