The school attendance thing is a numbers=funding levels, and not everyone needs to be there every day to learn. That said, most kids actually do need to attend daily in order to learn because of their learning style and level of self motivated learning. We would go on 3 week vacations during the school year when I was a kid. We'd take a note to the teacher asking for 3 weeks of school work, get all of our books and assignments and come back on track or ahead of the rest of the class. Nobody ever had any issues with it back then. If we did that now the school would be trying to take us to court.