Voting with their feet : students and absenteeism

Abstract

There is a body of research to suggest that working class students do not achieve at school. This failure also manifests itself through high rates of truancy and absenteeism, especially in trade schools, which cater for a student population which comes mainly from a working-class background (Sultana, 1992). Common sense explanations to account for both school failure and for absenteeism construct students as deviant and puts the blame either on the absentees themselves, or on some deficiency in their background. This paper sets out to show how a number of absent~es in a girls' trade-school contest this notion, constructing a different understanding. Absenteeism to them is but one form of resistance towards an institution that has not only abandoned them to failure but proves to be irrelevant and restrictive. The fact that this paper reports data collected from one school means that one cannot generalise the findings to account for the whole gamut of reasons which lead students to absent themselves from school. As in the case of other social phenomena there are a multitude of elements which impinge on the individual or group of individuals and which encourage them to absent. My ethnography does, however, provide an in-depth exploration of the definition of reality of fifteen absentees, and of their reasons for resisting and contesting school. While no definite attempt is made at generalisation, it is argued that the insights developed in this study could possibly apply to other school sites and situations as well.