Taking your children out of school
It has become a very accepted practice nowadays but I don’t think you should take your children out of school for holidays or for cultural experiences.
I think education is important for children and I think it is important that children should respect the institution of the school. The lesson we should teach our children is to respect the authority of the school and the teachers. By taking a child out of school for a holiday I think the message you are giving is that personal gratification is more important than education. I think you are undermining the authority of the school in the eyes of your child.
I also think the argument that they are learning more by being on holiday and seeing Greek ruins etc is not a valid one. School is there to teach children a body of knowledge that is rational and abstract and experiencing things is not the same as knowing things.
But mostly as a parent we do have to make value judgements and we are part of the process by which our children learn what is valuable or not. Taking your child out of school for a holiday indicates to them that going to school is more arbitrary than they have been led to believe, and that personal pleasure trumps respect for educational institutions.
Who says education isn’t also personally gratifying? And holidays (and more importantly) cultural experiences certainly aren’t just about ‘personal pleasure’. You make it sound like school is like some kind of nasty but necessary medicine and anything else is a bag of sweeties.
You offer no evidence whatsoever, even anecdotal, that children do take on the negative values that you presume they do from this experience. You also fail to consider any of the possible positive values that they might also take on, such as the importance of family or independent thinking perhaps.
And to say “School is there to teach children a body of knowledge that is rational and abstract and experiencing things is not the same as knowing things.”… that sounds like a curriculum from 1962!! I must remember to tell my daughter’s teacher that she must only learn rational and abstract things in school from now on and leave any experiences for the holidays.
I don’t actually disagree with you, entirely. I’m just writing this in the hope that your readers will see through your opinionated, poorly constructed argument and realise the matter might be just a bit more complicated than you make out.
Steve,
There are lots of elements to your reply- probably an essay’s worth! But for this reply I want to take up your suggestion that parents taking their children out of school leads to independent thinking. If independent thinking is a flouting of authority in its own right- then I suppose that is true.
My view of independent thinking is children are given knowledge exterior to themselves which helps them to make educated judgements, academically, socially and politically. Although I am not against flouting the rules if appropriate and for a cause I judge to be right, I don’t think independent thinking arises from just not doing things you ought.
Your argument is convincing, but isn’t one that I’ve actually heard from school management and local authority “attendance” personnel. They focus wholly on potential damage to the child of the failure to attend school.
The case against taking your child out of school is also presented in terms of meaningless statistics and absence target levels where the difference between a 93% level and a 96% level means Ofsted will get off the school’s case about absence. In my experience, even teachers don’t talk about in-term vacations undermining teachers’ authority.
Rather than sticking up for education, or teachers, properly, school management and local authorities threaten potentially uncooperative parents with taking away the child’s place at school. The idea seems to be that parents need frightening into compliance, possibly because school management and local authorities don’t have any idea what a good argument could be for not taking in-term vacations, but are well practised in how to guilt trip parents.