I attend a public school in the United States, and attendance is de-facto enforced by questions that you answer during class (using iClickers, or by quizzes you turn in at the end).
Unfortunately, my friends in the class have annoyingly moralistic views on academic honesty, and the professor made it quite clear what the consequences of doing this would be :(
> Unfortunately, my friends in the class have annoyingly moralistic views on academic honesty
Their is nothing wrong by adhering to the rules of a school, and I think it is not that good that subverting the rules is such common practice that actually following the rules is considered annoying. If the rule is so egregious that it can not be followed then sure, but showing up is literally the easiest part and statistically has strong correlation to better performance.