I learned how to study in my AP classes from 10th to 12th grade. I learned how to figure out when I didn’t know something. I also learned how to read and write in basic Spanish. I learned a lot about the US government and economy. I learned how to write a paper, how to gracefully accept when I was wrong, and how to argue when I was sure I was right. Not everyone has good AP teachers, I’ll admit, but anyone who truly learned nothing from 9th to 12th grade was either extremely unlucky, *or *could not *possibly *have been paying proper attention.
I don’t understand it either. I remember having a class devoted to it in seventh grade math, and even then I was like, “Why the hell is this something you have to TEACH someone?”
If finance should be taught in high school, I’d rather it be about something that will matter now as well into the future. Like compound interest and how the stock market works. Strangely, I learned about the first while taking calculus in college (it was either that or ecology). And I still don’t really understand the stock market–like what a dividend is or the meaning of those numbers you see on the ticker. But I did learn how to score a game of bowling, though. So I guess I learned something useful in high school.
Yeah, I’ve never balanced my checkbook in my life. I write maybe four or five checks a year, and these days they all get processed electronically, usually the next day. What’s the point?
I do remember a lesson in fifth grade about how to write a check, though. That was useful, I guess.
I definitely do think home-ec/shop type curricula could do with a personal finance course. How to save, how bank accounts and interest work, how revolving debt works (especially calculating how long it will take to pay off your new plasma screen via minimum payments), how to do a basic 1040, how retirement plans work, etc. Those are useful practical skills that a lot of people lack.
I think the focus on balancing a checkbook is more “you need to pay attention to how much money you’re spending, and on what.”
And to organize your time, and to respect schedules and deadlines, and to do what is asked of you instead of what makes sense, and to wonder why you’re asked to do the former.
Also how to tolerate, deal with, work, relate to and/or manipulate other people.
High school (and to a lesser extent, college) is a small, shallow pool that nevertheless mirrors what goes on in the deep end of life, with its jerks, its injustices, its preferential treatments, its regular crops of bullshit - but none of it really matters so you get to make errors and learn from them before you tackle “real life”.
Learning is just something to do to pass the time while you’re really learning something entirely different.
Finally but perhaps most importantly, high school keeps you penned inside, mostly out of trouble and from under the legs of adults, and off their lawns.
It’s a bit off topic, but just to weigh in, I think this is an absolutely terrible, ridiculous idea. There isn’t a hope in hell this would come to anything positive. You aren’t really going to know which track most kids should be on at age 12, you’re creating a system bound to encourage classism and racism, and I’m not sure we really need a society where we tell a kid what job they’re going to do when they’re barely starting puberty.
There’s also the question as to what you hope to accomplish. If a kid at 12 is deemed to be suited for “blue collar” work are you going to deny her/him access to things like English Lit and advanced history classes? If so, well… why? I know people in blue collar jobs who’re damned smart and attend the Stratford festival and enjoy the fine arts, and I know people in white collar jobs who care not at all for such things. For that matter I am highly dubious that a two-stream system even mirrors the realities of the employment marketplace.
I’m more inclined to say I’d like to see high school make kids take a certain number of core subjects - English, math, some basic history and geography, basic science - and then give them a choice of other things to take from a large menu of available courses. Which is how they currently do it around here, actually.
Let’s not forget that we set up a system of government so that everybody is allowed to vote towards who is the big boss. I would rather hope that people learn some basic skills at school that help them make decisions when voting. If you don’t know where France is, you still get to vote. If you don’t understand basic statistics, you still get to vote. If you don’t have a general idea of economics, you still get to vote. That’s scary! I’d rather attempt to introduce people to some of these concepts (however poorly we apparently do this) before they have any say over all our futures.
That, again, sounds like a 30 second speech… and a lifetime of experience. I don’t think a class on it would be very useful.
Actually, aruvqan’s idea resembles the system in the Netherlands fairly closely, and as a system of education it ranks as one of the best in the world.
Children choose a high school at age 12, having been tested for abilities. There are 3 types of high school:
MAVO: ends a 16 and leads to vocational training
HAVO: ends at 17 and leads to what internationally is called university, but wouldn’t be a really good uni
VWO: ends at 18 and leads to top universities
You can switch around at any time and you can always carry on with your schooling. You would never be trapped in one stream. In practice, it’s pretty clear anyone from any background can and does go into any of the three options. Many, many students move between the three. Both my sisters started out doing HAVO but added on an extra year to do VWO. No big deal.
It has the obvious advantage that you are taught things much more specific to you, on your level. Everyone still gets the basic skills.
I don’t know all the details, but Israel has something similar.
It’s worse than that: it explains why vocational education sucks in this country: we treat it as a dumping ground for kids who don’t make the college cut, as the consolation prize for the slow kids, as a way for them to get by, considering. It’s pure classism: a skilled vocational worker makes as much as a professional, but no one pushes a kid with the capacity to be an electrical engineer to be an electrician, even if his personality is better suited to it. So we get vo-tech programs filled with lazy and slow kids, which perpetuates the idea that they aren’t for kids who have any other option at all.
I’ve said it a 100 times: skilled trades require serious hard work and intellectual ability to master. Not everyone in a vocational program needs to be a genius–anymore than everyone in college is a genius–but if the whole program is full of kids who can’t read and do math well enough to go to junior college, you aren’t going to turn out master plumbers and skilled mechanics and metal-workers. At best, you’ll turn out people who can go work for those guys.
I’m a computer programmer, too, but I DO use things that I’ve learned beyond 8th grade. It depends on the specifics of your job.
In my case, I do use trigonometry all the time, algebra once in a while, and French occasionally, just off the top of my head. But that’s just because of the type of software I work with.
Of course, that’s even after the good ideas everyone else has had about how high school and college should teach you how to learn.
Mostly college educations are to socialize you to act in certain ways that distinguish you from people that did not go to college. It’s a device society uses to keep the children of successful people advantaged so that they in turn have a better chance of being successful. Most educations would be better as apprenticeships but that’s been established as a lower class way of learning so it helps out the narrative if only certain segments of society are educated this way.
For me, Computer Science B.Sc. has been enormously useful.
Actually, there were situations where I’d recall a specific course and think why didn’t I apply myself more. The theoretical stuff I learned in Systems Theory, Information Theory, Polynomial Math, Project & Task Management are extremely useful for coming up with creative solutions in ever growing world of Banking Onformation Systems.
One example, in Information Theory we learned theoretical basis for WinZip.
You have. It’s just so internalized that you don’t realize it.
Underclass my fucking ass, I guess you have never had to pay an auto mechanic $75 an hour to repair a car, or a plumber $200 an hour to fix your plumbing, or any random repair tech $$150 starting for a service call. And we are desperately short of people for the trades. Instead we have hundreds of thousands of IT specialists for 10s of thousands of jobs, and lots of people working McJobs because they can not find a white collar job that uses their college degrees, and beaucoup college loans to service.
Hey, I’m all for people being mechanics if that’s what they want to do. What I’m not for is telling anyone, especially a 12 year old “You aren’t smart enough for college, and hey… somebody’s gotta fix my car.”
If being a mechanic is so lucrative and upwardly mobile, why aren’t you doing it?*
*I’m certain that being a mechanic is lucrative and I’m certainly no snob about professions. But generally people espousing aruqvan’s proposed system do so with the assumption that they and their kids are college material.
Whether you are joking or not this is a huge practical consideration, and an enormously important function high schools perform for society with respect to managing older teenagers.
I didn’t learn much of anything in school either, since I had a bad attitude along with ADD and a math disability. I flunked my way along (only passing most grades because I’m bright and test well), didn’t do assignments, didn’t study (still don’t know what ‘studying’ is really), and read my own books/wrote/drew pictures rather than paying any attention in class. I dropped out of high school in 2003 and never went to college.
But I love to learn, and I’ve been learning things all along on my own which enrich my life every day. That’s ‘education’, too. In some ways I’ve even come out ahead of most of my friends in my age group (90% of my friends have at least one 4-year degree), since they haven’t had as much time to learn practical life skills, being so involved with school and often completely dependent on their parents. In other ways my bad attitude during school bit me in the ass a bit; I had no basic math skills and was bad at time management, for instance, when I first started working for a living at 18. But once I realized I needed to know these things to do my job and live my life more easily, I learned them very quickly.
I don’t think there is intrinsic value in formal education, since it’s quite possible to get handfuls of diplomas/degrees and still end up incompetent, dull, and unable to think critically. But you can also benefit from high school and college immensely, if you are motivated to learn and to learn how to think within that framework. Not everyone is, and that’s okay.
Certainly there are exceptions. But arguing by using examples of exception or personal experience are not substantial unless your willing to also assert that most people use a lot of what they learned in college in their work. I’m in medicine so obviously I do. In professions of science you tend to use much of what you learned. Most people don’t go on to work in science related fields though. So the thrust of the thread is correct.