Holidays are great, aren’t they? All happy and sunny and punctuating the insufferable misery of every bit of your life that’s not spent on holiday. They’re increasingly important, particularly for those in my generation who are unlikely to experience the sweet buffer of retirement, instead dying at work in the same jobs we hated in our twenties.
In the sort of civilised countries where sick people aren’t left out of pocket by medical bills and mothers get a bit of paid time off work to spend with the tiny human they’ve produced (sorry, America), employers are legally obliged to provide a certain number of vacation days each year, probably because we’d go insane otherwise.
Videos by VICE
Work, school, general existence: it’s all exhausting as hell and sometimes you just need to get away from it. And when your home is a constant trigger of negative emotions, the further the better – so that’s exactly what the Davies family decided to do after an objectively shitty year.
Following a bereavement and severe illness, parents Roy and Jenny took their two kids to Corfu for a week to decompress. It being significantly more expensive to travel during school holidays, the Davies children missed a week of school. According to the Mirror‘s Fleet Street Fox, that makes them horrible parents who lack respect for teachers and are worthy of our collective vitriol.
As well as displaying an impressive lack of empathy, FSF (AKA Susie Boniface) is just plain wrong. See, I’ve been in that situation.
When I was 11 years old, my family took the road trip of a lifetime down the California coast. My parents had wanted to make that journey for years, but then my dad went and died, which bollocksed things up a bit – both in terms of that holiday and our more general family dynamic. My sister had just gone off to university and my brother was soon to follow; we needed something to strengthen our bond, and a couple of weeks in close quarters did the trick. It was the first holiday we’d taken not sleeping in tents or on extended family members’ floors, and it opened us up to an entirely new world. Getting to know my family better, I no longer felt like a child surrounded by adults – and in spite of missing a week of school like some kind of monster, I managed to ace the Year 6 SATs.
Boniface claims that “more than anything else this story is about teachers – about parents who resent them, ignore them and finally blame them”. Teachers have an incredibly difficult time, I agree. I know this because my mother, as well being as a terrible parent who took her child out of school for five days, was a teacher. But I also know that the idea of a week outside the classroom actually damaging your education – or disrupting that of those around you – is, in most cases, total bullshit.
The thing is, after you’ve learned to read and write and got the basics of maths down, the education system’s sort of run out of anything particularly useful to teach you. It’s not the teachers’ fault; they’re just following a curriculum set by people who’ve never taught, which is why you probably never learnt much about important things, like politics or taxes or how to fucking apply and interview for a job. In fact, I can remember exactly three useful things from my 14 years in state schools: pathetic fallacy is when the weather reflects the mood; magnesium is great fun to set alight; and, thanks to a catchy Mac DeMarco-esque song, how to ask a French person when their birthday is.
I can remember more meals I ate on that holiday than I can useful lessons at school. What Boniface doesn’t realise is that, for starters, you miss surprisingly little in a week, particularly at ages 13 and 14, like the Davies children. When I was 13, there was a lunchtime game where you’d push so hard on someone’s heart they’d faint, and a couple of kids nearly died. You can afford to go without that. She also fails to accept that education isn’t confined to the classroom, nor should its worth be measured exclusively in tests. Emotional growth is far, far more important than anything else you learn in your early teens, and it’s time we realised this en masse.
On top of it all, Boniface’s proposed solutions to the problem are flawed. She suggests that if money is the issue, they could take their kids on a series of weekend B&B breaks, which several people have since pointed out would not work out any cheaper. It’s the same smug tone you get from those who criticise parents for feeding their kids junk food without realising it can be significantly more expensive to eat healthily.
While I’m loathe to suggest that parents generally know what’s best for their children (after all, that’s the line anti-vaxxers take and they’re genuinely bad people), it does seem like a certain level of discretion needs to be used. I’m not saying school isn’t important, or that people should make a habit of taking their kids out for a beach break every year, but when the family’s had a rough time like the Davies had, it probably won’t fuck them up too badly to get away for a bit. If you do it right, you can even help them grow into more well-rounded individuals who don’t go on to write ill-advised slam pieces about other people’s families.
After all, we’re talking about a situation in which we can, as a 43-year-old perpetual teenager once said, beg to dream and differ from our hollow lies. This is the dawning of the rest of our lives.
On holiday.
More about growing up:
