"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.
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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.
Yeah, and some practical concepts are going to require knowing abstract concepts. A lot of accounting is just algebra presented with words instead of letters for variables. Understanding compound interest requires understanding exponents.
And the duality of "why do I need to learn this" and "why are they teaching me this" is to push off personal responsibility for the education. Real life has a lot of these tests that come up at random and require specific information, requiring different forms of puzzle solving. And they teach different methods of puzzle solving in school.