My wife and I have noticed this, and it is really bizarre because it is across all kinds of demographics. We consider school mandatory for our son, except for medical reasons or significant events (funeral, for instance). Nearly all of his friends, even those that have teacher parents, will often be out of school, "because we wanted to go skiing" or "didn't feel like it today". I don't get it at all, like I didn't get the memo of "meh, school is optional".
Our son doesn't really even want to miss school, because he knows we'll make him do his missed work anyway. I guess we are old school (we are older, Gen X parents). The pandemic seems to have, if not broken, changed society in many fashions, and I guess schooling is one of them.
Many of his affluent friends still won't turn in homework and regularly get Bs and Cs and their parents just shrug. We are far from "tiger parents", and push our son to mostly get As because he easily can do so, and feel guilty that we don't push him harder to do advanced work.
> still won't turn in homework and regularly get Bs and Cs and their parents just shrug
> feel guilty that we don't push him harder to do advanced work.
Can you take an A or “advanced work” to the deli and exchange it for a sandwich?
The people you are criticizing realised the pointlessness of it all and that extra work (or knowledge) beyond a baseline doesn’t make a measurable difference worth the extra effort.
Long term, high school doesn't matter, college really doesn't either. One can accelerate the other which can accelerate life but long-term, if your kid sucks at life, no amount of school diligence will solve that. Inversely, if your kid sucks at school but is a good worker & intelligent, their school credentials won't matter.
Past the first job, credential specifics stop mattering really. No one will care whether you got an A or B+ in Calculus in junior year.
If the kid is doing alright and isn't getting into too much trouble, I don't see the issue of letting them play hookey with parent permission especially in their final years.
My parents had a policy that if we had good grades, we could skip days occassionally in our senior year. We'd take the day off and just pal around on errands if we wanted.
Just kept my kids out of school a couple days for skiing earlier this week. In my opinion, the education that school offers is only a small subset of all the things one can and/or should learn and experience in life. Academics are, of course, important, and we ensure that our kids are among the top of their classes. But there's so much more to life. I feel absolutely zero guilt for playing hookie to expose them to exciting, interesting, challenging, fulfilling experiences.
Our son doesn't really even want to miss school, because he knows we'll make him do his missed work anyway. I guess we are old school (we are older, Gen X parents). The pandemic seems to have, if not broken, changed society in many fashions, and I guess schooling is one of them.
Many of his affluent friends still won't turn in homework and regularly get Bs and Cs and their parents just shrug. We are far from "tiger parents", and push our son to mostly get As because he easily can do so, and feel guilty that we don't push him harder to do advanced work.
Weird times.