A Dictionary of Truancy

A DICTIONARY OF TRUANCY is a comprehensive overview of a fascinating, complex and age-old phenomenon : bunking off school. The challenge for the Author - who has written on this specialist subject before, with very positive reviews - was to draw in all the strands of unauthorized absence from the classroom. To his knowledge, the Dictionary approach has never been used before in this area of education. The advantage of A-Z is that the reader is quickly able to identify an avenue towards understanding, then move to another clearly-signposted avenue, without the need to scan dense text. The Dictionary format also allows differential emphasis to be placed on important, or hugely significant, factors above influential but less prevalent, contributors. The Author begins his Dictionary with a carefully-considered Introduction : an essential overview. In turn that Introduction attempts to set a few negatives against a number of positives -thus ensuring that the entire work is not a demolition job on youngsters who have already had more than their proper share of life's misfortunes, family break-up, and personal crisis. Each following A-Z entry then allows for further balanced discussion of each and every temptation, each restraint, each response ( personal, legal, societal ). Throughout, the Author reveals his enthusiasm for social policy, especially when this is ad hoc, piecemeal, incremental, or even nonsensical. He suggests that if there was a simple "answer" : prohibition, fine, imprisonment, expulsion, grounding, tracking, rounding up, humiliating, whatever, it would have been discovered before now. In that context, he perhaps reflects his own impatience with draconianism. His preference for listening, sympathy, and softly-softly exploration of young people's alienation or anxiety becomes evident all through his tackling of seemingly unrelated questions. At the same time, and as a former teacher, he also flies the flag for schools despairing of lessons wasted, exams not sat, pupils placed at even further risk than they were before they hid in the loft, or dossed down on an accommodating pal's sofa. The Dictionary ends with different useful appendices and a marvellously comprehensive Bibliography - citing some works long out-of-print. In summary, this Dictionary could usefully be placed on the bookshelf of every head teacher, every staffroom, every probation officer, magistrate, or social worker in the land....if only because browsing it proves as entertaining as it is tantalizing, as rewarding as it is enlightening. And still a work in progress !