School won't allow my child 4 days off

Not the best translation, but this gets the message across.

YL6

One point that no one brought up in the debate over HS is private schooling. In UK and US how many parents would remove there kids from the public system if they could? Any good British parent does one of two things, moves to a catchment area for a good school or spends the money and puts them in private. You have to wonder how good the system is.

You have to wonder how good the system when so many want to pull there kids out!

Or another way of putting it, would you put your kids into a crap school?

I'm currious to know, do German "private' schools exsit and do any German parents home school.

Home school not allowed in Germany. And there are private schools, which were not particularly popular a few years ago - generally state schools were ok - but now more and more parents are opting for private schools. You can find them if you check the phone-book. A popular one, for example, is the Nymphenburger Gymnasium.

Yet another attempt to generalize about the public school system and paint them as all bad. The problem is that parents want the school system to do all of their jobs for them. Or another way of putting it, are parents engaged enough with their kids to ensure that they are learning and growing properly or are they lazy SOB's that shouldn't have had kids in the first place? Of course, I am generalizing as there are good private schools as there are good public schools. What would happen if every kid went to private school? Would it still be so good in the minds of those that seem to think it is the only way to go? What is it exactly that private schools do that is supposedly so much better? Why not pay the extra monies needed to make that available in public schools for everyone and not just the snobby spoiled rotten kids whose parents have more money than time to spend on their kids?

I should know better than to jump back into this (no no! stop now, marya!)...

...I'm surprised at you, eurovol. That is a rather ugly sweeping generalization. There are excellent and poor public schools, and excellent and poor private schools. As to parental imperatives: the point of a private school is that presumably the parents have some say in curricular and admin matters, as they foot the bill. Parents that make the not-inconsequential financial investment in private school are looking for options for their children that they have not found in the public-school system. That is true here in Germany, as well as the US and I imagine, the UK.

The original point is -- why do parents have so little authority over their children in the German system that they have to lie, bow and scrape, and perform contortions to take the children on a family trip? Doesn't that ring all your libertarian bells? It's a de facto institutionalization of young people, it destroys parents' authority and confidence, it undermines the family unit -- for what? Do we really, honestly think that some admin person that doesn't even know our child's first name has his interests more at heart than his parents?

I still fail to understand -- why do parents put up with this? Why hasn't there been a revolt against the crummy 3-tier system (channelling little kids into Gymnasium, Realschule, or Hochschule), that removes options, possibilities and dreams? Why do families blindly follow the capricious rules of some supposed authority figure? And more importantly, what are the children learning from this?

m.

I realize that a lot of this thread is months and months old, but I find it immensely interesting that people are being threatened with fines for taking their kids out of school a few days before summer vacation, especially considering cases like that of "Jessica", the girl who was tied to her bed by her mother and was never sent to school. Nobody seemed to care that she was supposed to be in school and so she eventually died of starvation. I realize this is just anecdotal, but there seems to be a problem at least on some level of making sure that kids get sent to school in the first place. A few days here and there doesn't seem to be a big problem.

nevermind!

@TTornado
The (happy) outcome of the problem is mentioned in post #110.