While ironing last night (Hay was out at yoga) I watched something on TV about parents taking their kids out of school during term time so they can save a bundle on holiday costs.
One parent waxed lyrical about the educative benefits to kids of being totally immersed in a foreign culture - all the while sitting in an hotel pool-side area infested with other Brits. Now that's irony! Perhaps the parents meant the culture of the Yorkshire couple in the room next door, or the Scots down the corridor....
The sad thing is that these are the very same parents who will wail when their kids fail their GCSEs and shout from the rooftops that the education system has failed them.
A headmaster was interviewed and told he must have sympathy for the families who have children at his school when so many percent were on free school meals. Well, the way to get your children out of the vicious circle of becoming the next generation of parents to have their kids benefiting from free school meals is to ensure they aren't absent from school. Simples, as they say. To these parents, a good, cheap holiday among fellow Brits on the Costa Del Sol is worth more than their kids' future.
Notwithstanding what I said above, why bother fining the parents? We will always need uneducated people to fill the menial roles, and if that's what the parents want for their kids, then surely that's their right. Analyse and discuss.
1 comment:
Parents shouldn't have "rights" to disadvantage their kids, but also a sense of perspective is needed; for example should schools also be penalised for allowing kids to do bugger all academic work in the last week of term (as is often the case).
Then again, people have freedom to indoctrinate kids into whatever random (and sometimes harmful) religion they themselves were indoctrinated into so it's all relative.
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