​Why School Absences Have ‘Exploded’ Almost Everywhere
www.nytimes.com
The pandemic changed families’ lives and the culture of education: “Our relationship with school became optional.”

Nationally, an estimated 26 percent of public school students were considered chronically absent last school year, up from 15 percent before the pandemic, according to the most recent data, from 40 states and Washington, D.C., compiled by the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute. Chronic absence is typically defined as missing at least 10 percent of the school year, or about 18 days, for any reason.

  • Dark ArcAEnglish
    2·
    8 months ago

    Likewise, school teaches much more than propaganda and facts, but offer the opportunity to learn how to regulate one’s emotions and temper their attitudes.

    That’s crap. I went through roughly 20 years of schooling and not once did “school” teach me anything about interpersonal relationships. Maybe a teacher here or there would give a tip but it was people and life experience in general that taught me all of that.

    Until Marx detailed it, all workers were exploited without realizing the whole system rested on them.

    There’s a history of publicly available schooling going back to the 1700s in the United States. Marx literally couldn’t have been more insignificant in how education has evolved. I know Lemmy is very pro-Marx, but there is a VERY weak relationship here at best and realistically there’s none.

    Given the Marxist movement was strongest in the Soviet Union and in many ways actively opposed in the United States from local to federal levels, I’d say Marx has had a very minimal impact on US culture until recent decades where some of his ideas have been reconsidered more broadly and more favorably.

    Sure, we get a few geniuses here and there, but with literally millions of kids out and about with no real guidance this isn’t going to be good for a future workforce. Kids without the structure of an environment where collaboration and co-work are made available to them will struggle to integrate into other groups.

    Literally throw kids into a video game with a few friends. They’ll learn and collaborate all on their own, these aren’t skills that really need taught, though teaching can help act as a shortcut.

    It’s not exactly what you’re saying, but I’m so tired of “learning how to learn” rhetoric.

    The school system in this world of standardized testing is unduly stressful for students and teachers. It’s also loaded up with straight up busy work (I don’t care what you say those hours of my life wasted on mandatory word searches were NOT bettering me in any way) and things most adults have long since forgotten. I’m not for absences from school, but it’s past time we actually took a hard look at what we’re doing and whether or not it’s working (IMO it’s not and, as one of those “top 10%-ers” that got the various little academic achievement trophies and all that jazz, I feel much of my childhood was wasted on pointless exercises).