Everyone agrees that truancy is a bad thing because it means
1/ The student is losing valuable school time, falls behind and finds it very difficult to catch up again – especially the persistant truant.
2/ He/she is then unsupervised and wandering around the town and liable to be targetted by predators and possibly in other types of danger.
3/ He/she will be bored and may well begin vandallising the place and causing other trouble.
There has always been a truancy problem but in former times it was punished, as was all misbehaviour, by corporal punishment. This meant that there was a real deterrent to skipping school. Now the only real sanction a school has is ‘Suspension – in other words, the girl or boy is sent home, losing valuable school time and falling behind with their studies! Is there something I’ve missed here? The punishment; the ultimate deterrent, is the equivalent of playing truant!