Truanting, skiving off, wagging

or just plain "not going" to school?

I never deliberately stayed away from school for a day and my siblings didn't either. We would not have dared to "take a day off". On the very, very rare occasions we were ill we knew we would still be expected to do school work. I was quite knowingly sent to school with "German measles" or rubella because it was thought that it was actually a good thing to infect as many little girls as possible and "get it out of the way".  

And of course we had the added problem that our mother "did not believe in illness" of any sort. Her "Christian Science" beliefs did not allow for that. Until we moved back to the bush it was my paternal grandmother who would care for us if we were too ill to be at school. She would appear with such comforts as hot water bottles and "beef tea". Mum simply withdrew after making sure we had school work to occupy us. She didn't want to know. It is just as well we were very rarely ill enough to need to miss school.

When I was teaching I never had a child deliberately miss a day or a parent who would have condoned such a thing. My problem was the reverse. I had children who did not want to miss a day. I know I had one child who had insisted on coming to school although he was obviously not well enough. His mother sent a message. "He is not contagious. Let me know if he falls asleep." (It was a Friday and he didn't want to miss the next chapter of "The Silver Sword". I was reading it to them in the last period while they got on with knitting their football beanies. He admitted this to me the following week. "You could have read it for yourself," I told him. He grinned at me, "That wouldn't be the same!")

But apparently there are now an increasing number of parents who are much less concerned about whether their children are actually attending school. Some parents are even being threatened with court action. This puzzles me. School is all too often seen as not just school but a sort of free child minding service. There is also a much higher number of "school refusals" - children who do not want to go to school. 

"He tells us he hates school," one mother told me some time ago in the library. He had been failing to attend school and I had noticed him more than once. He found places where he could read without too many people taking notice. Yes, he should have been at school. When I talked to him he just shrugged and said, "It's so boring and it's noisy all the time." It was clear the learning environment did not suit him. He now goes right into the classroom under parental control and I suspect that is even worse.  

I know he is an exception though. He is a child who is happy to learn but not in the way he is being told he must learn. He is not a child from some of the outer suburbs of this city, a child who simply wanders the streets and gets into serious strife out of boredom. Even in the unlikely event their parents took them right into the classroom would they stay? At secondary level they might simply leave at a lesson changeover. It would be almost impossible to stop them.

When I think about it perhaps the remarkable thing is that so few students do actually deliberately truant. This morning when it is not just cold but wet and windy a warm classroom seems inviting.