Celebration of Truancy

Indulgent Parents Reproducing After Their Own Kind

We blogged recently on the brouhaha at Hamilton's Fraser High School.  Columnist Kate Hawkesby has taken the "rebel students" to task for their walkout.  Well done.  Well said.

I fully support the principal of Fraser High in Hamilton.  To the parents who don't support her - and say she called your kids losers - newsflash: they are losers.  They are losing out on teaching, on some tough talk about their futures, they're losing an opportunity to learn respect and what care looks like.

This principal, on the occasions she leaves the school grounds during class time for meetings, sees groups of students sitting outside the dairy, fish and chip shop, bus stop, just wagging, smoking, and basically avoiding school.

She wants better for them. She was urging them to put in the work now, and create a better future for themselves.  She didn't mince her words, and quite likely realised she had to be blunt to be heard. To make an impact. Telling it like it is, is not infringing someone's human rights.
The students who staged the mass walkout yesterday were the usual suspects - most likely the ones wagging in the first place.  Students like this don't value school. Tellingly, many of them were junior students, in Year 9, who as some seniors pointed out, misinterpreted her message. Or just plain didn't want to hear it.

These students are not crusaders for a better world, they are just trouble makers wanting attention. By all means protest something worth protesting, but storming out of school wearing t-shirts with "F*** you Mrs Crawford" written on them in ballpoint, is about all you need to know about these students and this protest.

They're not interested in dialogue or engagement, they're interested in drama.  They're certainly not interested in school.

You can, at a stretch, forgive the students for being naive, young, or being led by the pack, but as for the parents - the two of them who joined the protest - what were you thinking?  One of the parents said she thought it was good the students were standing up to the Principal. Why? So they learn to disrespect authority at a young age? So they can have yet more time off school? So they can work on their graffiti skills on T-shirts?

Get a grip.  Encourage protest around issues and things you believe in sure, but to stand up and support a bunch of kids playing truant (again) and abusing the Principal as they go is ridiculous.  [NZ Herald]

Last time we checked truancy was a breach of the law.  Sadly (but so predictably) the Ministry of Education has been cacophonously silent.  One would have thought that given the high truancy rates in government schools, the events at Fraser High--hyped up by the media--provided a golden opportunity for the Ministry of Education to beat the drum loudly against truancy.  It presented a glorious opportunity for the Ministry to stand four square in support of Principal Crawford's direct confrontation against truancy.  Yeah, nah.