Obviously it’s not doable to stay away from school that much, and I only did when I had a fever or was puking. That said, there were probably some years I at least got close to that 18 days. I would think the few years I went on a vacation I definitely went over it.
Have you been around kids post COVID? Winters after the pandemic have been a nightmare for many parents. My nephews have basically been "sick" the whole winter (getting sick, staying home, recovering, going back to school, getting a new virus, repeat).
Another thing I've noticed is that post-covid they've come home from school with more stories of the teachers just putting on videos and having the kids watch that, or else they just read crap on their tablets. What I'm saying is, it seems like education has also changed post-covid. It's like the teachers are still remote-teaching even though everybody's in the classroom.
This is public school, and maybe that's how they do it these days?
Is there some catalog of how many videos and things are watched during school hours, because I never remember that as a kid. Yes it would have been a VCR rolled out and all that, but if I wanted them to just watch a movie I could do that from home. So weird.
I remember watching video 4 times in school total. At the time teachers didn't know how to start the video player so a kid always did that, the teachers weren't used to showing videos in class at all.
The worst case I remember was a social studies teacher in junior high school who, during the World Series, turned on the classroom television to the game and had us all watch it with him.
Has anyone seen any actual research into why this is? It seems pretty serious.
Now we’re sick constantly, it seems. It’s so much worse than before. I think our immune systems are doing some catching up.
[edit] for the timing, we started getting sick a bunch right around the time masking dropped off to near-zero everywhere around us.
Tuesday we are getting sick again, sigh.
I can definitely see how COVID shutdowns unmoored some families from school and the return process made it a generally less compelling experience. If you aren't learning, socializing all happens on your phone, and you'll graduate regardless, then why go?
Some parents are even giving negative-fucks about school, in other words being actively against public education, teachers, and so on. I know of Facebook groups where parents share tips on how to maximize the number of absences without triggering various flags. And, a surprising number of my wife's friends from church have opted for homeschooling, so they can teach their kids from the Bible and skip all that science and math "liberal indoctrination". It's scary.
I can't believe how much of this is creeping into even HN too, a group of presumably above-average educated techies. Just look at the comments in this article dunking on the school system! Education is, for most people, their only shot at achieving the ever-shrinking middle class.
If find this ironic considering liberals think math is racist and don't believe in biology, statistics and especially not in economics.
>> Education is, for most people, their only shot at achieving the ever-shrinking middle class.
You believe education can only be attained in a school?
I can assure you, the people newly complaining about "liberal indoctrination" in schools don't mean science and math. It's fine to disagree with people about what should be taught, but it's not productive to ignore how much education has changed and why people object to it, and then disingenuously mischaracterize them.
Things aren't always getting worse. And IME the schools tend to get better in the long term.
There are probably legitimate criticisms of recent changes to public education, but it's never the things that Republican politicians harp on.
Also, for what it's worth, much of what my generation was taught in school was utter bullshit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies_My_Teacher_Told_Me. If anything, the idea that my children would be taught that the Pilgrims and Indians were best friends, that Columbus was someone to look up to, or that the Civil War was really about states' rights is what would compel me to homeschool, not "liberal indoctrination." But many, like DeSantis, still appear to believe that these lies should be taught.
"Opposition to what was purported to be critical race theory has been adopted as a major theme by several conservative think tanks and pressure groups, including The Heritage Foundation, the Idaho Freedom Foundation, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), and organizations funded by the Koch brothers. [...] In 2021 [Christopher Rufo] wrote on Twitter, 'The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think 'critical race theory'' and 'We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.'"
"The Economist and Reuters have conducted polls on how much the general public understands CRT, a 'once-obscure academic concept', and they found that most people are unfamiliar with CRT and misunderstand it."
(From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020s_controversies_around_cri....)
It is absolutely a conservative boogeyman and (for the most part) has never been a taught subject outside of college.
I would assume you also oppose teachers getting their Master's in education? After all, that's not a subject that has never been taught in any primary school ...
Thank god (ha, ha) for immigrants I guess.
The Internet’s been a disaster for civil society.
You're equating attending public school with "Education". The two can be mutually exclusive.
I loved college and was able to learn. I didn't get great grades but I was participating in the education process.
Anecdotally that seems to be the case in my kids' school district (although one complicating factor is that a lot of kids have family back in India or China and go back for long absences at winter break), and the culprit is generally illnesses, which have been extremely rough the past 2 winters.
I am glad my parents allowed me to be, because school was really, really damaging to my mental health when I ended up needing to be chronically absent.
And yeah, I simply just needed to be away from school. I guess I’m more so making a point that during the pandemic there was also probably a ton of students who realized they can learn without school, and it might even be better for them.
I don't think having a cold or two is going to put many people in this category. Decades ago when I was in public school, the kids who were chronically absent like this were the ones who clearly had some behavioral issues or problems at home.
The linked study also demonstrates that the rates are strongly associated with socioeconomic factors. I think the real issue here is that a subset of people simply have fewer fucks to give about school, and that has been accelerated by the distance and space that COVID created between students/parents and school.