"Stuff school should have taught me" material is actually stuff your parents should have taught you.
"Stuff school should have taught me" material is actually stuff your parents should have taught you.
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.
And what if one has shitty parents?
And what if one is only able to visit a shitty school?
Your right though, one should have easy access to good education no matter what kind of home they are from.
Public policy can/should fix shitty schools. You 'just' need funding, staffing, and leadership, plus to some extent a willingness to ride roughshod over parents who willingly avoid teaching e.g. science, sex ed.
Public policy can only do so much about shitty parents.
Schools are a societies responsibility though. So I can try to create better schools for all while trying to create better parents... Oh wait I'll taggle that with better social support systems and educations for future parents as well!
Good schools rock!
I think a better question is, for those who have shitty parents, should it be a school's responsibility to fill in the gap, or should there be other social programs made available so that there isn't an undue burden placed on teachers and school administrators?
I mean the reverse also applies. What if one has a shitty school?
No, it's really not the same thing. You can legislate better schools with a variety of methods, the main point being that you're regulating government jobs(to oversimplify). You're more limited to negative legislation for parents, such as punishing child abuse. I guess you could technically legislate certain mandates for parents to be better parents, but like, good luck passing said legislation. And even if you do(and this is the big boi), how the fuck do you enforce that??? And on top of even that, how can you be sure parents will be qualified/able to teach their kids such a wide variety of skills? You can fire teachers for incompetence and publicly investigate school districts for failing to faithfully implement good practice. And it should also be mentioned that shifting these expectations (especially via legislation) onto parents will disproportionately burden the poor who will be less likely to have the time, skills, or knowledge to teach said things.
Some people receive a better education being homeschooled than what their local school system could provide. Does that mean we should abandon the school system entirely?
The worst case school is still better at teaching you then the worst case parents. Parents who aren't in a position to teach you anything are also a lot more common than the worst case school.
The point of this post is that if your parents didn't teach you this stuff, among other life skills, they failed you. Not only that, but schools can't always be expected to pick up the slack. Trying to revise schools to teach absolutely everything a parent should would just turn every school into a boarding school.
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.
Many people's parents are not present in their lives at all or don't have these skills themselves to be able to pass on. What you're proposing will just result in more people growing up without these skills. School should teach a person everything they need to know for adulthood to ensure that everyone has the chance to learn it. If your parents reinforce those lessons even better.
I'm proposing parents, or at least extended family members (which I should have mentioned), act as a family unit rather than letting the school do everything. Not only will this be a more efficient arrangement, because children are not metal sheets waiting to be stamped into the shape of an ideal person in a factory, but it will reinforce the failing bond within families today. This would lead to better educated, more intelligent, and happier young people.
Yes in a perfect world where everyone lives in a happy nuclear family that would be wonderful. That's not the world we live in and we need schools to fill the gaps and provide support for the children that don't have a home life that can support them. You can have both the school and parents teaching them but if you have neither it leads to shitty outcomes.
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.
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.
There are no prerequisites for being a parent. There are MANY prerequisites for being a teacher. We should be fortifying the curriculum of our schools to give ALL students a good education, not allowing the birth lottery have as drastic of an effect on children as it currently does. Parents can be very helpful or nearly useless and schools should do their to help students recover from the failures of bad/unprepared parents
At the same time, parents should teach/reinforce all the lessons they think are critical, and not depend on an imperfect school system to do right by their child. If it's something your kid should know and be familiar with, teach it to them. If they already know about it from school, find out what they were taught and be careful to consider what's wrong and what's simply different from when you were taught it.
Kids should have no expectation on who should teach them what. They don't really have a say in the matter, they're children. Everyone responsible for those children needs to do everything they can to make sure the children get a fair shot once they start having a little more control over their own lives.
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.
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.
My school never offered a home economics class.
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.
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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 of your examples are just senseless. People don’t have DIY skills because of the increasing specialisation of our society. We’re not at home learning how to fix things, because we’re in school learning how to do other things instead.
This has been the case for so long in some places that a lot of peoples parents don’t have those skills to pass on in the first place.
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Isn't that quite a bit degenerative? I think everyone should have at least some basic skills.
It is degenerative, which is the point of the argument.
We fostered a society where both parents work, often far away from where they live. The time normally and naturally allotted to educating your own children has been steadily shrinking to make room for an education that normally lasts until adulthood. The expectation now being that your children will not pick up the family trade.
For some people, this trade off has been degenerative in some aspects, and that’s why they complain ‘school never taught me x’.
Boy, if only we had access to a globe-spanning network of computers that could give us access to information on how to perform basic repairs and small construction projects. If we had that we'd be able to teach ourselves the skills necessary to save hundreds or even thousands of dollars a year by not calling a professional to do simple work.
Too bad such an information network is just a fantasy and everyone is completely helpless. We had better resign ourselves to not even try to solve our own problems.
You actually are better off specializing in something to make more money than you are to diy everything. You're better off paying people to do things for you so that you can enjoy your free time. Source: have spent the past few weekends fixing my god-damned car due to several problems cropping up at once and having to redo several things due to shitty parts and/or finding more problems once I got everything apart. In fact I should have just gotten rid of the car before I ever started, unfortunately, I don't have a crystal ball.
I sort of agree in that parents should teach in addition to schools. However, this feels like entitlement showing because it makes a bunch of assumptions about parents (that others have already commented on), but just even having parents. There are a lot of people who only have one parent, or no parents for various reasons. What about kids who lost one of their parents to cancer and their remaining parent doesn't have the capacity to teach the subjects you mentioned? Schools provide an opportunity for common education for everyone.
If one parent dies, that's tragic. The surviving parent should seek support from friends and family to raise the child. If both parents die, that's even worse, and the kids should be placed either with their remaining family or with one willing to adopt them. That's an entirely separate apparatus.
Nah because many many parents totally fucking suck and don't teach their kids shit.
That's the problem. If parents didn't suck, we wouldn't have this genre of nonfiction.
Okay, but my parents were shit, so I learned nothing from anybody.
And if we, as a society, make it a habit to offload our morality and wisdom teaching onto the schooling system, we're going to end up with no more parents at all; just breeders who ship off their kids. I'm sorry your parents were terrible, but that doesn't mean we should force every school to pick up a curriculum for everything.
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 then 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. This is 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.
EDIT: english can be hard.
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.
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.
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.
I think some stuff is on the person themselves as well to be honest. The one I hear a lot is about “School should have taught us about taxes”. Except that school probably did teach you, it taught reading, maths, and general research (Google) skills.
The tax code changes all the time so it would be pointless to teach you about it 5-10 years before you’ll actually be doing it.
Plus the people I’ve heard this from in my own life, have been people that I know would not have paid attention to it in school anyway
Okay, I can kind of sort of get behind you on this but, there should be at least like a basic civics class that covers the general topics that you are likely to encounter as a functioning adult in society.
My mom let me do our taxes when I was 13.
She then reviewed what I had done, helping me along the way of course, and pointed out some things that I had missed.
When I was 14 I got to do them again, and she reviewed them and noted that I had done them very well. I have never had any issues doing my taxes as an adult and I've never paid a preparer to do my taxes for me.
This simple experiment has saved me several hundred dollars if not several thousand dollars over my life.
And it was literally easier for her because she had to do less work.
So I agree with the original poster that parents should be responsible for teaching their children all of the things that school will not teach them, and I also agree with you that it's not that much to expect people to learn these things for themselves.
But, I also have to throw in the fact that I have always been an exceptional learner, and so I can't compare my own experiences with that of the average because I don't know how much my innate thirst for knowledge has biased me towards competence in this area above that of my peers.
My dad did the same thing with me. It was obviously very helpful, but it’s not like there isn’t an obvious prerequisite.
Not everyone’s parents are financially competent nor will they have the time to successfully coordinate an effort like that on top of everything else they might be required to do.
Additionally, what function do we expect of school? Is it to equalise, for young adults, those opportunities normally limited by education? Then it should teach those things which are important that not everyone’s parents are capable of teaching.
The other point is that school is the main temporal and logistical barrier to actually teaching your children as a parent. Between work and school and the other bureaucratic necessities of life, there isn’t always significant time a parent can spend with their child.
Also, many of the things these people claim school didn't teach them were actually taught in school. Maybe not directly, but in most cases schools do teach all the basic things one needs to do, for example, a tax return. They simply didn't pay attention.
That too. The lessons are so boring that nothing is actually learned, time and money are wasted trying to teach something to people who do not want to learn.
My kids definitely spend more waking hours at school. If they're doing extracurricular activities it isn't unusual for them to be gone from 7a to 9p. The earliest they get home is 6p. Oh and then they still have homework.
Fair point, but those activities are optional and they still need support from the parents to carry on. When I got out of high school in the US about a decade ago, we were getting let out of school at 2-3PM. The latest I ever stayed was probably 5PM for a club. Even so, you're providing food and shelter for them, you raised them from birth to when they could start going to school, and you probably want to be there for them in some way after they graduate from school, while they're in college, and beyond. Schools are too limited in scope to do all that.
Yeahy my oldest is 19 and she did a semester in the college dorms but she's back home now. And actually she'll listen to us now. When she was 17 she didn't hear anything we said. We tried to teach her some of these things but she knew it already. Until she realized she didn't. She's knocking out some debt really quickly now, she's doing really well.
There are some topics that are just boring and not relevant to kids, even if those topics are important for them later as adults.
And forcing them to sit through those topics at school when they're so bored they will immediately memory hole the whole semester is a waste of everyone's time. Your parents should be able to sit down with you and show you why what they're teaching you matters, and know when to teach it.
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.
Jessie what the fuck are you talking about
Oh, sorry, I WAS TALKING ABOUT MONEY.
Agreed. It amazes me how little responsibility parents want to have for the education of their own children. We outsource it like a chore.
At school, i had a class that was supposed to teach us about paying taxes, how stuff are made, how stuff work etc.ee
The teacher played poker on his laptop instead of teaching
Edit: for my opinion on the post: some parents cant My father has been working in a different country for longer than i was born, my mother is extremely busy and, including homework and travel, I do school stuff longer than doing other stuff(excluding sleep)
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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.
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.
That's cool and all, but what if you just don't have that? What if your parents are dead and you're forced to grow up largely neglected in an overcrowded foster care group home? What if your parents both work 60-80 hour weeks at multiple jobs trying to keep a roof over your head and at the end of the day don't have the time or energy to do much more than throw a tv dinner in the microwave before they go try to get enough sleep to do it all over again the next day? What if your parents are drug addicts? What if your parents are abusive assholes who not only don't care about your wellbeing, but actively seek to harm you on a daily basis? What if your parents just had shitty parents themselves, and can't pass down the skills and knowledge you need because they never got it themselves?
Where then should someone go to learn the life skills they need to navigate the world if not school? Is teaching children the skills they need to survive adulthood not the entire point of having schools in the first place?
It's cool that your childhood was filled with so many caring and interested family members that it never occurred to you the enormous amount of people who don't have that, but you are apparently luckier than most. I knew a couple of kids in middle school and high school
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
deleted. decided i don't have the energy to argue about this.
