If you're purposely lying just to get out I find it's stupid when in regards to work.
I can sympathize if it's just a terrible job that you only do for the pay, but it's just poor practice to skip days of work when there's no good reason for it.
You don't get paid, the work isn't done, the boss and rest of the workplace now have to pick up the slack and/or some poor person get's slapped with extra shift.

In regards to school there is no 'leaving it on others' factor to worry about, or the fact there's a responsibility to do a job that people rely on you for.
It's still stupid/poor practice if used in extremes though because it does nothing but harm your education and learning, but as far as we restrict this to High School and Elementary school you can very easily catch up on say one missed day with no problem. The work is easy, often times the school is so disorganized in how they teach anyways.

Sometime's it helps to just get the day off, when High School being daily classes expect you to do homework each day basically so the time off can help. Not so much with college when you have at a minimum an entire week between assignments, and in college if you miss a day, you missed a week. 

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TLDR: Work -> Poor Practice, generally no good reason to do it.
School -> If High School or lower, the quality of the education and the challenge of the work is low enough that you can easily skip a day and be fine. It's all about a healthy moderation.