School is not all that important. At least not so important that missing a few extra days will make an appreciable difference. What’s important is love and a good relationship with your loved ones. Looking back at my childhood spending quality time together would have done way more good for my development than sitting in class learning I don’t even remember what.
Why School Absences Have ‘Exploded’ Almost Everywhere | The pandemic changed families’ lives and the culture of education: “Our relationship with school became optional.”
Submitted 7 months ago by silence7@slrpnk.net to nyt_gift_articles@sopuli.xyz
Comments
nehal3m@sh.itjust.works 7 months ago
silence7@slrpnk.net 7 months ago
They’re not talking about a few days; they’re talking about 18 school days per year.
themeatbridge@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Or one day every two weeks. Which doesn’t seem that bad, when you consider normal cadence of dentist visits, checkups, vacations, and the occasional 3 day flu.
nehal3m@sh.itjust.works 7 months ago
Yes, I read the article. I stand by my point.
School as it is right now is a remnant of the effort to educate children into competent factory workers or management. We’ve grown to accept that the 40 hour week starting when you’re 4 or 5 years old is a prerequisite to a successful career and that the point of the whole system is to give kids a fighting chance in the economy as it will exist 20 years after they start that journey. We implicitly assume that is the best way to go about life and we’ve structured society around it.
I question whether it’s still worth it for today’s kids. Kids who are destined to excel academically probably will. Forcing the rest to go through the motions at the cost of their childhood is not the best way to treat humans in my opinion.
njm1314@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Local Schools where I am just change their attendance policies and I think that’s the cause of a lot of it around here. I was talking to the attendance office the other day and they said that an absence for any period in school counts as an absence for the whole day. So when I had to pick up the boy from the nurse’s office at 3:00 they counted him absent for the whole day. That’s not how it wasn’t my day, when I went to school they took attendance at 10:00 and didn’t give a shit past that
AnarchoSnowPlow@midwest.social 7 months ago
It feels like we’re sick all the time now. We hold our kids out more frequently than we used to as well, to avoid getting other people sick.
themeatbridge@lemmy.world 7 months ago
We also keep them home if we think they might be sick. When I was a child, you had to have a fever, sore throat, or vomiting to stay home. There are more conditions that warrant staying home now.
silence7@slrpnk.net 7 months ago
Yeah, my understanding is that people are spending about twice as much time sick as pre-pandemic. Probably responsible for a third to half of the increase in chronic absenteeism.