Hi, I&#x27;m a gainfully employed translator of Japanese and linguist.<p>Short answer: the sentence is fine as it stands, although your alternative is equally grammatical (if less idiomatic - &quot;学校へ行かない&quot; gets about 1&#x2F;4 of the ghits of &quot;学校に行かない&quot; by my count, and personally I&#x27;d never use へ).<p>Long answer:
Japanese draws a distinction between verbs of A→B movement (e.g. 行く to go; 引っ越す to move house; 移動する to move&#x2F;change location) and verbs that describe the manner of motion (e.g. 歩く to walk; 走る to run). The A→B verbs can happily take an indirect object complement (a に phrase) as the destination, because there&#x27;s really no other possible meaning. You can&#x27;t &quot;go for school&quot;, as you put it.<p>Verbs of motion, on the other hand, are less flexible. These can&#x27;t take an indirect object complement, and need a more expressly destinatory case (think へ、へと、まで). The reason for this is that a change of location is not implied in the verb, however counterintuitive that might seem to an English speaker.<p>Interestingly, motion verbs can take a direct object (を), such as in 街を歩く &#x27;to walk around town&#x27;. Another indication that they&#x27;re not strictly destinatory. Also they can take adverbs that further qualify motion, such as ぽつぽつ歩く &#x27;to dawdle&#x2F;mosey&#x2F;toddle&#x27;(? tough to translate), whereas 行く can&#x27;t. A→B verbs can however take adverbs that qualify the speed, like ゆっくり行く &#x27;to go unhurriedly&#x27; - but this is different from ゆっくり歩く &#x27;to walk in a slow manner&#x27;.<p>This is my first ever comment on HN so I&#x27;ve tried to be as informative as possible... If you have any counterexamples I&#x27;d be happy to try to explain them.