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Ben is a young boy of six years old who lives with his mother and father in a nice neighborhood. Every day, he rides the school bus and attends classes alongside other students, then returns home to stay with a babysitter until his parents arrive. Then, one morning, Ben decides to stop going to school because it feels as if he knows everything being taught in class, and so he doesn’t want to do it anymore. However, his mother persuades him to reconsider by theorizing what would happen if all the students in his class felt the same way and stopped going to school. She points out that it would impact not only the students themselves but also the lives of the bus driver, their teacher, and their parents. Realizing how much such absences could affect the lives of those around him, Ben chooses to continue his usual schedule.
This fully illustrated story is a simple way to stress the importance of attending school for very young children. The situation comes up and gets resolved swiftly, with Ben choosing on a whim to stop attending school but never actually missing it, thanks to his mother’s intervention. It is somewhat reminiscent of William Dean Howells’ short story “Christmas Every Day,” where a child wants an endless stream of Christmas celebrations to enjoy, only for one of her parents to theorize what such an occurrence would mean for her and the state of the whole world. The difference in Ben’s case is that the mother focuses her line of suppositions on how being absent would affect the people he knows from his neighborhood. As a result, Ben gets a glimpse into why his normal routine is so important without the matter getting too wild or extreme. It is a gentle story to tell children who don’t wish to go to school for one reason or another, which many parents will likely appreciate as well.