Opinion: National truancy epidemic due to lazy parenting

What chance do you have in life when your automatic reaction to the slightest adversity is to quit, wonders Mike O’Connor. VOTE IN OUR POLL

Having decided early in life that education was a waste of precious time, I sympathise with the 1.4m Australian children who have arrived at the same conclusion.

I was six years of age when I slipped out the school gates on the first week of Grade 2 and walked home. Mum, bless her, listened patiently while I explained why I would no longer be spending my days cooped up in a classroom, and just as patiently asked me if I would do her a really big favour and give school another go.

A son cannot deny his mother, so I trudged back to school and into the education system, wherein I rose without trace all the way to Year 12. If they had handed out prizes for outstanding mediocrity, I would have a cupboard full of them.

But what of those 1.4m kids from Years 1 to 10 who are regularly missing at least 10 per cent of classes? Will their parents sit down with them and patiently explain to them that they are doomed to a life of underachievement and workplace drudgery if they don’t go to school?

Pre-Covid-19, the attendance level was 73 per cent. It has now fallen to 59.8 per cent, and the way the numbers are trending it is likely that before too long, one in every two Australian kids will be skipping classes.

For Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children, the figures tell an even sadder tale with attendance levels falling from 46.9 per cent in 2019 to a new low of 35.2 per cent last year with the attendance rate for their non-Indigenous classmates sliding from 74.8 per cent in 2019 to 61.6 per cent.

To put these numbers in context, they mean that almost half the nation’s students in Years 7 to 10 lost a month of schooling last year.

In primary school, one in three students skipped at least one day of school every two weeks.

I’m writing this from Hobart, surely one of our most charming cities, but the ugly truth behind the carefully preserved heritage buildings, award-winning wineries and harbourside restaurants is the fact that it is estimated that about half of the population between the ages of 15 and 73 is functionally illiterate.

Kids attending government schools are more likely to miss classes than those in Catholic and independent schools, but attendance has dropped below 2019 levels across all sectors of the education system.

Australian Government Primary Principals Association president Pat Murphy makes the point that it doesn’t matter how good the teachers are if the kids aren’t there, and takes aim at parents who effectively abandon their duty of care to their children by failing to instil in them resilience.

Remember resilience? It used to be a national trait, an inbuilt ability passed down through generations to overcome the trials and tribulations of everyday life and keep moving forward.

To take the easy path rather than rise to the occasion was to be dismissed as a quitter.

Somewhere along the way over the past few decades, that resilience has been diluted.

As Murphy says, school leaders need to work with parents to instil in kids the understanding that when things get tough, they had to persevere which meant showing up at school the next day after you have had a bad day instead of lying sprawled on the couch watching daytime TV and feeling sorry for yourself.

Australian Secondary Principals’ Association president Andy Mison says it is clear that some parents now do not stress the importance of education.

He puts it delicately, saying that “some parents clearly don’t have the capacity to ensure attendance like they used to’’.

They have the capacity, they are just too lazy or indulge their children to such a degree that they don’t want to risk upsetting their delicate natures by telling them to put down their phones, get off their butts and head on down to the school bus stop.

What chance do you have in life when your automatic reaction to the slightest adversity is to quit?

Failures to remedy flawed curricula are partly to blame, but the core of the problem that is making our kids dumb and dumber is the ever-widening belief that we are entitled to take the easy way out.

Sadly for many of these 1.4m kids, by the time they realise that quitters are ultimately life’s losers it will be too late.