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.
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.
I know the nuclear family isn’t always possible. If it isn’t, then a few aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, etc. should be in the home as well. Schools have their utility, but by no means should they replace parents in all but the most dire of circumstances.
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.
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.
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.
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’.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Which one would be easier to change? Every parent, or the educational system?
It would be easier to change the educational system, but our society has grown so gluttonous for shortcuts that I can’t recommend the easy way here.
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.
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.
That’s good to hear. Teens can be tough, but I’m glad you’re there for them.
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.
Jessie what the fuck are you talking about
Oh, sorry, I WAS TALKING ABOUT MONEY.
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.
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
