Clearly I could be accused of sticking my oar in here due to the fact that our now adult children never opted in to the school system, but society as a whole benefits from education, including school.

Here in England and Wales parents whose children attend school are fined for taking them on term time holidays (vacations). I find this peculiar because my recollection of holidays is that I learnt a lot more on them than at school. Even so, presumably pupils occasionally learn things there, which is a good thing and gives us buildings which take a while to fall over and surgery which doesn't always kill people, and I think we would agree that this is a Good Thing.

This, then, is my proposal. Before going on holiday, families submit a plan to the school which describes the learning aims and objectives of the holiday. The school then records the content of the missed lessons. On returning from holiday, the children are tested on what they've picked up - foreign language phrases, cuisine, cultural and economic knowledge, geography, biology and so on. When these topics are later encountered in the curriculum, the pupils are given tuition in the subjects they have missed instead of the topics concerned. This won't work perfectly due to building on knowledge which has been missed due to absence, but it will be better than nothing.
-- nineteenthly, Jun 10 2016

random, halfbakery