Schools shouldn’t be treated as these magical places where you’re put in at some age and over a decade later you emerge a complete human being. You have parents and you spend more time at home than at school for a reason: you’re supposed to learn from your parents.
A school can potentially give you a degree of financial literacy instruction. Your parents should be the ones paying your allowance money and driving you to the bank to get your first checking account. A school can teach you how to cook something. Your parents should be the ones eating your food and helping you cook it better. A school can show you some level of DIY. Your parents should directly benefit from teaching you how to fix the sink when it gets clogged. A school can tell you what kinds of careers exist. Your parents should love you enough to tell you that either your career ambitions or your financial expectations need to change. A school can tell you how to build a resume. Your parents should be the ones driving you to your job interview and to your job until you buy your first car. A school can give you a failing grade when you do poorly on a test. Your parents should be able to make you face the real, in-the-moment consequences of doing something wrong.
Expecting a school, public or private, to teach you everything you need to know is a grave mistake. You need people in your corner who are taking an active part in raising you all the way to adulthood and beyond. If you have kids yourself, that goes for them as well. If you aren’t there for your children, to teach them the things that schools don’t teach because they can’t mass produce the lessons to nearly the same quality that you can give them, they’ll blame you and the school for having failed them. And they’d be right to lay the blame at your feet.
Agreed. It amazes me how little responsibility parents want to have for the education of their own children. We outsource it like a chore.
Where do you draw the line? Some people’s parents teach them reading, writing and mathematics before they even enter the school system. Does that mean the school system shouldn’t teach those three?
What if your parents don’t know how to fix a clogged sink? Or to cook food more complicated than pasta with ketchup?
What do you see as the purpose of the schooling system?
I applaud the parents that are helping their kids learn actual academic subjects to help them succeed in school. My point is that we have more and more people today whose parents are failing to prepare them for the wall world, and we would be better off if we concluded that “My parents/family should have taught this” rather than “School should teach this.” Then we could end the generational brain drain before it happens.
If your parents don’t know DIY or cooking, then that’s a failing on their part. Hopefully they can at least get some extended family members to lend a hand in that.
IMO, the purpose of a school is to teach you the academic knowledge you need to do well in college and have a base of intellectual knowledge. Your parents should be teaching you how to actually live out your life, because they should have those skills too. They should love you enough to pass them on, and have the time to do so. Otherwise, they’re either doing you a disservice or they’re being hampered by some external factor. I can appreciate that there are a lot of parents out there who can barely keep the lights on, but that doesn’t mean kids shouldn’t have some kind of family life. We used to have larger households with lots of people in them all pulling the weight in some way, and many people still live like this. If we could go back to something like that instead of expecting every single mother and father to live alone in a giant house with their kids, we would be better off.
In the end, what I want is for families to pick up the slack and teach their kids the skills they need so they don’t look back and say “I was failed.” They should instead look forward and say, “Now it is my turn to teach,” because they had a good family life.
What do you think schools should do?
But some parents simply are not in a position to teach their children. School is the solution for that, so if we all accept that new lessons need to be taught, school is the best place for it.
If your parents don’t know DIY or cooking, then you won’t learn it from them, so who do you learn it from when it comes time to teach the next generation? Also, whose fault is it? Theirs or their parents’?
Saying school is for college just kicks the can down the road. What’s the purpose of college? Should children not going to college be allowed to just skip school entirely?
If you believe that children should universally learn DIY, and you believe that the best way for that to happen is to learn it from their parents, and because of that oppose teaching it in school, then at the very least you’re just letting perfect be the enemy of good. We aren’t going back to the times before, so if the only solution you’ll accept is teaching at home, then simply put you’re functionally against children learning DIY.
What if they didn’t have a good family life? Is that it? Is your whole family line doomed to microwave meals?
I think schools should teach knowledge for the sake of knowledge, not because there’s some specific end goal in mind beyond having a general populace that is well versed in things.
The best question I can ask is, where does it end? Where do the responsibilities of the school (state or private) end and where do the responsibilities of the parent begin? If we start including everything under the sun for schooling, then eventually schools are going to completely take the role of parents in children’s lives. We need to draw the line somewhere, and we need to start holding families accountable for treating their kids poorly.
And renaming the books to “Things my parents should have taught me.”
i for one don’t think we should rely on parents to make sure children live good lives, as controversial an opinion as that may be…
the idea of expecting at most 2 people to be wholly responsible for a child’s upbringing is absolutely crazy, i don’t understand how it has become standard practice. For most of humanity’s history children were a communal responsibility, we need to bring back neighbourhood grandmas.
‘It takes a village to raise a child’. Still true now as it ever was…we just seem to have lost our villages.
I’m from Eastern Europe so my take might be country specific and factually wrong from US perspective.
I also like to think about this from the teachers perspective. The common sentiment of why do we learn X when it won’t be necessary for day-to-day life later is such a misplaced sense of disappointment on the kids and the parents part.
As an educator it’s true that one’s teaching with their whole being - be that e.g.: attitude and other non strictly subject related attributes. But in the current system - where the output requirement for high school does not include knowledge about the taxes, loans and other common sense skills - it’s pointless to expect anything else from the teacher than what’s in the curriculum.
Currently the point of high school is to get you prepared for your final exams (SAT in the US) in order to pursue higher education. That’s it. If the teacher is better than average than you might get something else in the process. Something more than just knowledge about a subject.
I agree that getting skills to adapt to challenges should be emphasized more than lexical knowledge which is currently not embraced by the current curriculum in Hungary but this is my point exactly. It’s a systemic issue that cannot be fixed by expecting more from teachers.
Here in the US, it was common for my high school teachers to lament the curriculum they had to work from but still stick with it. The purpose of schools here is pretty similar, as well: prepare you for college so you can do what you really want to in life. Lots of people seem to think that you should be taught everything that is appropriate for your age in school, but I disagree. That’s forgetting the role of your parents.
This is kind of a 50/50 thing. Parents should be the ones teaching the children manners, morals and anything useful in life to survive it than school. School is the place that should be educating and challenging your learning ability while teaching you things parents can’t. Parents can’t come up with daily curriculums like a school can. But Schools can’t teach things a parent should either, other than just jam it down your throat about believing yourself and aim high .etc
Dude thinks everyone has parents like him, elaborates that no learning of vital information in school is necessary if he himself got the knowledge from his parents.
I said “should,” not “will.” This post is more an indictment of idiots, abusers, and sloths who decide to become parents, than it is a jab at this particular genre of nonfiction. It’s more popular to say “school should have taught me this” than “my parents should have taught me this.”
Yeah like I’ll call out politicians, not about what schools teach and don’t, but what my parents teach and don’t?
Of course you’ll get less “my parents should have taught me this” than “school should’ve taught me this”. Your logic is quite biased.
Also if there are so many “sloths” etc that becomes parents, then it completely undermines your argument because schools should then teach what those parents aren’t.
How is it biased to call out people who don’t raise their children right? I probably should have mentioned the role that extended family can and should play in raising a child, but still. They can pick up the slack; we shouldn’t expect schools to have to do so. We as a society should stop accepting that families will just throw their kids in an institution, leave it at that, and hope for the best.
Schools should be very defined in what they teach people. Parents, or more broadly, families, know the kids best and how they learn. They should be able to give the kids a much more individualized education on the wisdom aspects of life. If we broaden the scope of schools to include pretty much everything children need to know, then we’d be better off shipping off our kids to boarding schools and washing our hands of the whole parenting problem.
Dude thinks everyone has parents like him, elaborates that no learning of vital information in school is necessary if he himself got the knowledge from his parents.
There, I put the discussion back on track.
Actually, I don’t want everyone to have parents like me. My parents divorced when I was too young to remember why and neither has explained why it happened. I want parents to actually teach their children how to live healthy lives. School has its place, but if you want school to teach children everything, then you might as well send them to boarding schools the minute they can string together coherent sentences.
Oooooohh, you’ve idealized a system that you’ve never experienced because you had shitty parents.
Yes, it would be nice if everyone’s parents were responsible and prepared, it would be nice if everyone had an extended family around them. I think everyone agrees with that.
The reality of the situation is PARENTS most often lack the training and resources to raise a kid. Parents lack the support of family, both parents are likely to be to work to afford their family.
The system you want doesn’t exist because nearly every member of our current system is engaged in capitalism, including the people taking care of the children for money, AKA daycares.
I see what you want, even if you don’t realize it, I wish I had good parents too, I hated school, but at least there were examples of good people there to show me how to live a non degenerate life, unlike my parents.
Oh, I know I want good parents. That much is painfully obvious. If my worst problem was that I was bored with my life, that would be great.
But again, where does it end? We need to draw the line somewhere and start holding people accountable for how they raise their kids. We need families to unite and provide for children however they can, even if that just means grandma watches them play when they’re home. Any little bit helps. We’re so atomized in America that maintaining a healthy family structure, much less raising children effectively, is difficult. The end result is that teachers are struggling to keep up and becoming burnt out. It would be better for everyone if people could just teach their children non-academic stuff instead of expecting someone else to do it for them.
My school taught me about taxes and basic home economics but people will happily complain that they needed to figure it all out themselves. The problem with teaching this stuff in school is that kids don’t care, don’t pay attention, and even if they did learn that stuff, they’ve forgotten the moment they’ve finished their tests. Second year of high school taught me about the different kinds of interests not because of loans, but because they’re useful concepts to explain math.
Even if schools teach kids all of the theory, parents/friends/the community should help kids make life choices.
That said, with the state of education I’ve seen in other countries, the school system does need to change. Kids aren’t going to pick up on any of the stuff you teach them if you let them graduate regardless of their grades.
Also, despite the cringe title, these books often do a good job explaining the stuff you didn’t learn because you were playing games on your phone. The ability to buy that stuff when you need it is pretty great, and they’re generally better than the AI driven SEO spam you find on the internet today. Hell, I saw a study that said most kids use Tiktok as a first search engine when they want to know stuff, that’s how bad media literacy has gotten; I’ll gladly let them buy the book now that stuff has gotten this bad no matter how bad the title is.
I would argue that your points about kids not caring and forgetting information are not inherent to the concept of education, but to how most places do formal education.
Humans learn best through practical examples that affect their lives, and through doing things. Sitting people down and giving them information, and then later having them regurgitate that information, is just not the best way. It’s cheaper, it requires fewer teachers and fewer resources, but it is not the most effective.
Some things will never come up organically or in an interesting setting. Taxes and learning about money is just never going to be fun. Your tax situation also heavily depends on how you make money, so if you’re a gig worker and your parents have government jobs, they probably don’t have much experience to teach you in the first place.
You need to know what compound interest is before you take out student loans or you’ll screw yourself over, but who really cares about calculating any of that when they’re 16. You’re also not signing your kid up for a loan so they can experience how to navigate the system. Some stuff you just need to be taught. That doesn’t just apply to those “once a year/once in a lifetime” situations, if also applies to skills like writing or grammar. You’re not going to find a way that organically teaches someone the difference between it’s and its.
I agree. Based on the comments I’ve read I think readers are interpreting it wrong maybe because Lemmy users tend to be young and many are students themselves, they see this as directed at them. Your post I assume is directed at the parents and people who someday intend to be parents. I’d also like to add that it’s the parents job to teach their children discipline and to discipline their children. Public schools should teach about all religions, parents should be the ones to raise their children under their choice of religion. Parents should teach their children manners and mutual respect before sending them to school
The people who say “why doesn’t school teach this” are the people who wouldn’t learn it in school if they did. Also, some schools do teach it.
My school taught basic taxes/investments. One of my friends, who is horrible with money, always complains that we were never taught anything. I’m like we were, you just didn’t show up or didn’t care to listen.
Just gonna add this to the pile.
Most kids spend more time at school than at home, and during their prime functioning hours, and their teachers prime functioning hours. Kids come home to parents that are often burned out by their job. We still do our best for our kids, but the vast majority of us aren’t professionally trained teachers, either.
I’m not saying schools should be in charge of everything a kid learns, but if there’s a baseline expectation of knowledge that we expect from every adult in our society, then yeah, we probably do want our children to learn those things in school so we can at least try to ensure every kid gets a chance to learn them.
The problem is that even those parents don’t know enough of that stuff to teach it to their kids. Either because they never learned it, or because the field has changed so much that their knowledge is outdated.
I’m glad my parents didn’t teach me how to cook because if they had, my cooking would fucking suck.
I will mourn the precious raw materials wasted to make your parents’ abominable food. In a better world, you and them would have made some killer stuff together.
I agree, under ideal conditions, parents should have the time and ability to teach their kids many things. At the same time, I believe in the “… sins of the father …”, and “… it takes a village …” aphorisms.
Not everybody has good parents. Or even parents that know this stuff themselves. Some people don’t have two parents, or their parents work all the time. You might want to broaden your worldview. The schools are there to teach kids what they need to live as an adult, which should include basic life skills. They already offer home economics, where she teaches you how to do things and basic enough level that you can make spaghetti and sew a button back on. There’s no reason why they shouldn’t have something about balancing your checkbook, keeping a budget, not going into credit card debt, etc. It’s just that the idiots in power haven’t figured that all out yet.
Here’s one, from what does money derive its value?
I mean, its the most important thing in our society. You’d think that they would make sure it was really hammered home.
Now, you’ll be told that it has value simply because we believe it does which isn’t untrue. Theyll say, you know, it’s like gold that doesn’t actually hold any value. We just believe it really hard.
The problem is, we value that gold is shiny, imperishable and we can make pretty things out of it. We didn’t have a big meeting and just randomly decide that gold would be valuable.
Another problem is that money is an iou. Except its, apparently, an iou that isn’t own to anyone and doesn’t have to be repaid, making it fall short of the criteria for it being an iou.
Tbf our economists dont really need to think about that, as, due to how money is created and destroyed, the position nets off due to the debt being repaid, despite the above. Theres no need to consider the non hypothetical part.
What if the underlying asset was human labour? You know, like how cotton, sugar and steel used to be used as currency in Virginia, the west indies and Sheffield respectfully. Its just that we live in human labour farm and you’re living capital. To me, considering modern monetary policy, its the only thing that makes sense.
I would argue that more important than money in a society is trust. If you can’t trust your interlocutor to not screw you over/kill you, then you can’t have a meaningful economic transaction. If you can’t leave your house because the trust in your society is so low you’ll be robbed the moment you go out the front door, you’ll be unable to contribute to the local economy. If everything you buy online is so defective and distrustworthy that not even the most minuscule amount of money would be worth it, then online commerce would grind to a halt.
I think what we consider currency is a different topic, but to tie it back into the conversation about parenting, if you aren’t taught to trust the right people and distrust the wrong people, you’re going to be duped, swindled, and abused much worse in adulthood. This isn’t something we should expect a school to do for us. We need to show it to our kids ourselves.
How much money would it take to change your mind? I’m sure we could find a number.
Money by itself can’t change opinions, it can only change behaviors. You could pay me some absurd amount of money and I’d delete my Lemmy account, but that wouldn’t actually convince me it was a good idea for any reason other than because you gave me a stack of benjamins. I’d still remember the place fondly.
Before we had money, we had human relationships, and those are based on trust. You can’t replace trust with money; people try to do that all the time and it ends poorly.
In terms of its effect in the real world, what would the difference be between you doing that and you genuinely convincing you it was true? To me, the importance of money and the real world effect it had on your choice to do the above dwarfs anything else. I mean, I’d do it too obviously. We all know people don’t really love their jobs and they’re just lying but who cares? They all turn up to work and bust their arse just the same. Money was important enough for you to publicly deny your own mind.
I’m not saying you have to replace trust.
In the real world, trying to buy people’s trust without convincing them logically/morally to do so doesn’t always end well. If your boss yells at you at work every day, would you put up with the stress of dealing with that for the sake of money, even if it led you down the road to substance abuse and strained relationships with your friends/family? If you realized that you’d kill yourself within a month if you didn’t quit? I sure wouldn’t, unless I was dead certain that I wouldn’t get a better job anywhere else. The place that tries to compensate for a terrible work environment with tons of money will eventually find that they have no workers whatsoever. Last I heard, that’s actually happening to Amazon - they have such absurd turnover in their shipping plants that they’re running out of people to hire.
I threw out the Lemmy thing as an example of something I might do for the sake of money. It isn’t an ideological thing for me, this is just a place for me to pass time and have an occasional interesting conversation (like this one). Having internet discussions isn’t more important to me than having a stable income, it’s a thing of priorities. My religion, on the other hand, isn’t something I would give up for money.
I’m not asking to buy your trust though. Even then, I don’t have to trust you. I only have to trust the effect money will have on you.
