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?
In my opinion every school should receive top funding regardless of neighbourhood to make differences negligible.
Dude, in a non-gender-specific way of course, I am fortunate enough to be a homeowner and such a huge percentage of my taxes go towards the schools in my area and they are still very poorly rated.
I don’t even have children, and I don’t think that that should grant me special exemptions because I want to live in a world with educated people so I pay my taxes to contribute towards that, but I’m literally paying $1,000 a year for the schools in my area to have money and they still suck.
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.
In theory, sure.
But in basically any third world country, you’ll find all the government schools are awful, and it would be absurd to rely on them to teach you life skills. Parents are about the same though
in basically any third world country, you’ll find all the government schools are awful
This is because it’s designed to create disparate outcomes; the capitalist class who determines policy want their kids to get a better education than the working class. There’s also ideology at play; liberalism demands privatization, even when it makes the system less stable in the long term.
Vietnam consistently scores similarly to the US with a tenth of the budget, Finland does significantly better, with only slightly smaller budget.
This is because those countries designed their school system to educate everyone.
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.
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.”
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.
Just admit you were wrong dude. It’s ok.
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’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 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.
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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.
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.
I think my lack of DYI skills is mostly due to not having access to a garden for sawing wood, and not needing to drill that many holes in my day to day life. I was taught basic woodworking in school (and at home). School did teach me soldering, a skill I’ve used three times outside of an educational setting.
But a lot of it also comes down to stuff not being repairable anymore. Solid wood furniture and old electronics could be repaired, compressed cardboard and razor thing modern electronics can’t be. With video guides explaining just about anything you can do with a basic toolbox available for free in every language, the problem isn’t a lack of information. A lot of stuff has just gotten better, cheaper, or more advanced, to the point where spending money on good tools won’t be worth it most of the time.
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.
Learning how to do simple stuff is worthwhile just so you don’t have to deal with the risk of having an incompetent/careless person working on your stuff. The amount of time I’ve wasted going back and fixing shitty workmanship from people my parents hired to work on their (practically brand new) house is ridiculous and I’m not even a professional. After dealing with all that shit I don’t trust tradespeople at all. I’m sure there’s good ones but if you’re just pulling names out of the phone book there’s a decent chance you’ll get fucked in my experience.
I didn’t say “do everything” now did I?
If I had the money I would hire a landscaper to mow my lawn and a cleaner to come clean my house and have laundry service done for me, and a good accountant who could somehow get all of those expenses written off.
Ok, but because you can’t afford to do that, you cannot specialize completely.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Better question, do you want the least educated among us teaching what’s not currently in taught in school? Cause that’s what you’re advocating.
Now it’s obviously not all parents, but the point still stands. The better educated parents are already doing something to teach their kids what’s not in the curriculum, but even amongst them it’s still a small percentage.
Including things like basic taxation and financial education, the voting system, stuff like that. Make it mandatory to go through, if not actually have a passing grade.
