I don't think that kids should be exclusively homeschooled, but I also don't think that kids should be going to a building with hundreds of people 5 days a week during a pandemic. It's one of the main reasons why it keeps spreading so rapidly and won't go away. They don't take any preventative measures at schools anymore (at least not around here). You got kids? You're getting sick. Your coworker has kids? You're getting sick.

Schools are back to counting attendance. You can't even keep your kid home long enough to recover from covid before sending them back. They literally send a "truancy" (police) officer to your house if you keep them home too often.

I feel like we could be doing something better. I'm not entirely sure what the solution is. But this isn't it.

Mandatory attendance is ableist

It’s time to have a serious conversation about how ableist higher education is, especially in regards to attendance policies. I mean, everything in this society is fucking ableist, but attendance policies are particularly bad and they’re something that so many bootlickers agree with because they think attendance = work ethic or that higher education = preparing you for the “real world”, whatever the fuck that means. 

I just came from the comment section of a TikTok where a college student was talking about how they got a notice from their professor that they were going to be withdrawn from the class because they had a 66% attendance rate. A 66% attendance rate isn’t even that bad. To put this into perspective: at my school, where we have 10-week quarters and classes are usually three times a week, that means missing only about 9 or 10 classes. We’re allowed three absences before our grade is affected, which is pretty standard, so essentially that just means this person missed two weeks of classes. The reason they missed those two weeks was because they were hospitalized with COVID. 

The people in the comments section apparently didn’t know this key piece of information and called this poor person all sorts of awful things like “lazy”, “a moocher”, “entitled”, and all sorts of other things as if she’s somehow crazy for not wanting to be dropped from a class due to being hospitalized. Even further, though, even if she hadn’t been hospitalized with COVID, her attendance shouldn’t have mattered as long as she was turning in the work and doing okay in the class. 

The people in this comment section also commented other things like, “College is a privilege, and if you’re not going to class, you’re taking a spot from someone else who deserves it more,” and, “Go to class, it’s not that hard,” and, “If you can’t go to class, you shouldn’t be in college.” 

These comments are not only ableist but also incredibly classist too because they completely ignore the reality that many students have to miss class to go to jobs. If it comes between going to class or picking up an extra shift that will allow you to pay rent and not become homeless, anyone would obviously pick the extra shift. When it comes down to it, class is just simply not that important. It isn’t part of our everyday survival. And even if there are a handful of superhero students who can juggle 2 jobs and perfect attendance, that shouldn’t be the standard. Not everybody can, or should be expected, to do that, and that’s okay. But I’m not here today to talk about the classism of this kind of rhetoric because that’s a whole separate conversation that deserves it’s own space. I’m here to talk about ableism. 

Because what comments like those do is tell disabled people (whether this is a physical or mental disability) that they don’t deserve an education, that they are lazy, or that they don’t deserve the spots they’ve fought hard for as much as someone else does based simply off of something that they can’t control. Many people in these comments were telling people to drop out if they can’t go to class due to illness and then come back when they’re “better”. This completely ignores the reality of chronic illnesses and all mental illness. These things don’t just go away, they aren’t something you recover from and then magically find life “live-able” again. They are everyday, life-long realities that you can’t just escape from until you’re “better”. And people with chronic illnesses still deserve a fucking education and a chance to have a good life and they certainly aren’t privileged because they can’t go to class. 

And people who have never dealt with a chronic illness/disability or mental illness will tell them to go to Disability Resource Centers to get accommodations as if they have any idea what that’s like and how difficult of a process that is. They have no clue that this requires an official diagnosis, which is hard for many people to get because of accessibility issues or even just the simple fact that doctors often don’t know exactly what’s wrong with us. And even when you have that diagnosis, this doesn’t mean a DRC is going to give you the accommodations you actually need. Not to mention, this process takes a very long time. 

This kind of rhetoric also ignores the fact that people learn differently. Some people excel in a lecture hall and learn great that way. Other people, often especially neurodivergent people, may have other ways that are better for them to learn. They may learn better from home or in a distraction-free environment (which a lecture hall certainly is not) or when they don’t have to be around people. Not everybody learns in a lecture hall. I certainly don’t. And that’s okay and that doesn’t mean they’re not cut out for college. It means that college deliberately excludes a whole subset of people and a whole other way of learning, and this needs to change. 

Not to mention, you don’t need to attend class to do well in your education. It simply isn’t necessary, and I can give you an example: 

My sophomore year in college, I had an agoraphobic breakdown. I’m diagnosed with anxiety disorders and also clinical, chronic depression. I could barely leave the house to feed myself, let alone to attend classes. Most of my professors were willing to work with me and be understanding; one wasn’t. I had many, many absences. I still got A’s in all the classes where my professors were understanding because I was still doing all of my work, and my work was exemplary, regardless of whether or not I was physically present in class. I ended up not passing the class where the professor wasn’t understanding literally only because of attendance. Every essay I turned in got an A grade, but I failed because of fucking attendance due to disorders I can’t control and didn’t ask to have. Luckily, P/NP grades don’t affect GPA at my school, so flash forward to my senior year where I’m preparing to graduate with a 4.0 GPA. So those motherfuckers in that comment section can go ahead and tell me I should have dropped out because I wasn’t “cut out” for college. But my academic record argues otherwise. I’m perfectly cut out for college. I’m just not cut out for mandatory attendance and all the ableist policies that go along with college-level work.

Mandatory attendance is a lie that people pretend means you have a “work ethic”, while ignoring the fact that physical attendance is often literally impossible for so many people for so many different reasons, even though those people are just as dedicated and hard-working as anyone else. It’s one of the biggest pieces of bullshit college feeds us. And it’s time to talk about how ableist it is.