Just a quick Question here: Should Life Skills be taught in high school or college. By life skills I mean things like how to balance your check book, communicate with civility to fellow human beings, how to do your taxes, how much a credit score can actually dictate, money management etc…etc…
I was just talking to a collegue about this and she was telling me how many of her students haven’t a clue how to manage money, or how many of them have credit card debt in the tens of thousands etc…etc… She is in the business department and we often lunch at the campus pub. If I knew in my late teens early 20’s what I know now about money management, and how much a credit score can really affect you, I’d be a lucky man. Granted I am 34 and have crawled out of my 20’s credit funk, but I think of how easily that could have bene avoided had I learned about it in High School or College.
I do not want to generalize here, everyone is different. I didn’t have it that bad, but I know there are people who do.
Should these life skills be taught in an organized forum at some early age? Are they taught and I just do not know about it. I do not know much about high school cirricula these days.
What other life skills should students be taught before they are let loose on the world?
My opinion, for the most part, is a resounding “Oh, HELL yeah” qualified by a slightly pessimistic “if they’d listen”.
Some people “get it” and some people, (IDBB comes to mind), no matter how carefullly reality and how to get by and/or excel at real life is explained to them, just don’t.
I was taught some life skills in High School, but not as a matter of general ed requirements. I learned how to balance a checkbook and do my taxes as part of an elective course that was then called DECA, or Distributive Education Clubs of America, the kids in the classes also ran the school store.
Some of the stuff helped me, and some of the “stuff” (particularly stuff about men), I just had to learn by trial and error.
Sorry, I’m getting offtrack. Overall? I think it would be a great thing.
High school might be a good time for life schools to be taught. By then, most students should all ready have a basic grasp of simple arithmetics and a decent vocabulary so they can get familiarized with the subject matter.
A life skills course should include basics on:
preparing a budget
performing household chores
voter registration and framework of voting system of their state
Anything with a curriculum of common sense should be taught at high school level. Life skills are, IMHO, overlooked during the typical high school career. It’s vital info that should be made available before graduating high school. I’m not one for the big sports push and perhaps if a life skills program were introduced into the public school system, it would catch a lot of these poor kids that get into credit trouble or just have no common sense. Also, a course for “walking a mile in another’s shoes” type of thing might help as well. Is it just me or are kids getting ruder as I get older? Don’t get me wrong, I’m only 31 years old but I would never have acted like some of these kids nowadays. Rude, rude, and self-righteous up the wazoo!
Its a great idea! I’ve long thought that morality sans religion or spirituality should also be taught in school. Too many kids aren’t getting the proper guidance at home or church. Of course Christians would never allow it.
Menu planning, effective grocery shopping and basic cooking - and make it a graduation requirement rather than an elective.
Add my nomination to manners. The Marine Corps can tun a brat into a well mannered and polite individual, so there’s no reason the public schools can’t do likewise.
jimpatro, most Christians I know would love morality of any kind to be taught in the schools. Just hearing that you shouldn’t rob, rape or murder people can be a refreshing message at times.
Yes. In fact, budgeting and balancing a checkbook were taught to students in my school district in the 8th grade. The class was called “American Problems” (later changed to “Civics”), and it was a mish-mash of all kinds of practical stuff we needed to know to survive in the real world.
In one particularly helpful unit, we were given want-ads for jobs, rental information for apartments, and price lists for various consumer goods (notably, cars and clothing and food). We had to pick a job (all entry-level, all low-paying), pick an apartment (you could live alone or be “roommates” with someone else in the class), and figure out a budget. Then you had to write “checks” to pay your expenses for the month, and balance your checkbook. Menus had to be planned and budgeted for according to the price lists. And on and on.
It was interesting. You could buy a BMW or live in a luxury apartment if you could somehow afford the payments. A lot of the males in the class learned the hard way that they were going to have to do a lot better than “entry level” if they wanted to drive a fancy car.
I don’t remember a lot of the rest of that class. I think there was a unit on first aid and CPR–I remember the arterial bleeding film we saw. And there was a unit on something about professionalism and the business world, and a local businessman came in to talk to us about something–probably interview etiquette and so forth. And I remember playing the stock market in one class–might’ve been that one.
I think that the “modern version” of this class should definitely include information about credit cards, credit scores, and mortgages.
I teach all of that stuff as part of my American Government/Economics classes for 12th graders. It’s not in the curriculum, but I think they need to know it, and this is the last shot I have at them before they leave high school. we do a lot of the things others have mentioned. Basic Life stuff. A number of former students have returned to say that those skills were the ones they really needed, and to say thank you. Makes the whole thing worthwhile.
We actually did get some of this taught in high school; I can remember practicing balancing a checkbook in Economics class, which was required. It probably had something on credit cards, too. But I’m not sure that the course did many of us much good, since we probably weren’t listening. However, I’m still all for a life skills class that teaches basic homecare, budgeting, credit card savvy, and so on. I’ll have to ask my sister if her HS offers one…
Most schools offer these things under “Life and Consumer science” or whatever the current incarnation of home ed is. In my school,at least, many kids do take these classes but they are not a requirement. They also get some of this stuff in co-op, if they co-op.
The problem with making it a requirement is that it leaves the question of what to cut. I’m watching my students (junoirs) sign up for classes. Their schedules are full–is a life skills class worth telling them that they can’t have that fourth year of Spanish, or AP Psych, or European history, or Statistics, or sports, or student council, or journalism, or academic decathalon? These are the most popular electives, and I can’t imagene telling a kid they have to drop one of them for a life skills class. Also, adding another mandatory class would make co-oping almost impossible, and for many of our kids co-oping (where you work in a heavily-mentoring enviroment) is where they learn their life skills.
They are selective about who they let in.
They are dealing with volunteers who, at least at some point, had enough ambition to wander down to the recruiters.
They can punish people by doing everything from assigning them extra hard physical labor to throwing them in jail. All schools can do in deny participation in extra ciriculars, call parents, and suspend kids. Against a kid who isn’t involved, really has no desire to be in school and who doesn’t care what their parents think, the only thing way a teachcer can exert control is by sheer force of personality–if one can’t convince the student to care what the teacher thinks, you simply don’t have any options. They won’t remove a child from the school for rudeness.
Adults go to college to gain a degree in a specialised field–not to be babied with lessons on how to lead their lives. Perhaps courses are structured differently in the US, but I can’t imagine sacrificing valuable classes that actually contribute toward a specialised, tertiary education with lessons on money management or manners.
High school life skill classes is another matter, however. Although it seems many schools already do offer some teaching in this regard.
One thing that bothers me is that a few of the topics listed are really “should be taught by parents” material. E.g., how to be polite. Schools should insist that students be polite and in while at school. But in general it’s the parents’ responsibility.
I think parents abandoning the raising of children, falsely hoping others will do it, is a major problem in the USA.
So my children can spot dishonest commercials on TV quite easily. (I.e., nearly all of them.) That’s a very important life lesson. Good luck to any teacher who says “Jimmy, why is this KFC commercial saying their fried chicken is healthy dishonest?” and wants to keep their job.
7th grade is not too early to start. All you need to know to balance a checkbook is basic adding & subtracting.
Smart teachers often incorporate such life skills into other classes. Math/Arithmetic is an obvious example for basic accounting, and it makes it far more interesting than the usual “story problems.”
I had a social studies teacher in 7th grade who taught us everything you would ever want to know about road maps – including how to fold them. Far more interesting and useful than being required to memorize the countries bordering Yugoslavia or the imports and exports of Venezuela.
I had a teacher who took a day or two out of some loosely-related class – driver’s ed, maybe? This was, I believe, eleven years ago – to go over a few things like checkbook balancing. Some of us already knew, but some didn’t, and he said it was something we shouldn’t get out of school without knowing. I strongly suspect many of the other kids came from families where nobody had a bank account, let alone knew how to balance a checkbook.
It’s hard to remember to do it now that I write about two checks a year, though.
yes they should. However i dont know if you can teach ‘responsible behavior’ which is what you seem to want. the best you can do is show how to act responsibly, and try to show the negative consequences of not acting that way.
i learned to balance a checkbook in 10th grade i think, it was in a mandatory accounting class.
Classes like typing, accounting, home ec, interpersonal communications, critical thinking & logic, etc should be mandatory. They probably wont accomplish much but they should still be mandatory as they are important skills.
Then again its not like adults are by and large bastions of competence in the game of life either.
We covered checkbooks and played the stock market with Monopoly money in my fourth year of high school. In all honesty, I can’t remember the real name of the class, but we called it “Soc” - perhaps it was sociology? At any rate, I do remember that we covered civics and economics, both of which are requirements for graduation in US public schools. As a freshman, I had to take Consumer Ed as a requirement, and I believe that requirement was changed while I was in school to the Civics/Economics one we have now (which explains why I had both). In Con Ed, we did the exercise Q.N. Jones describes, renting an imaginary apartment, and making a budget and so on. As naive as we were then, I remember working with an imaginary paycheck of $100 per week, and being able to budget not only rent and groceries, but also charitable donations and entertainment. It is to laugh, yes?
I never took home economics - cooking, sewing, and so on. That stuff, along with manners, was taught to me at home.
The one class I think should be a requirement? Critical Thinking 101. I was very fortunate in that my Soc teacher believed that the ability to think critically was crucial, and that she very adeptly incorporated that into her lessons. We were exposed to logic, philosophy, debate and media manipulation in that class and I can truly say that what I learned in there is the stuff I really USE “in real life.” Granted, we covered all that, plus the basic civics and economics, in one 40-minute class a day, so we did none of it in great depth, but nobody left that class clueless. (So as long as I’m being long-winded anyway, I’ll give a shout-out to Charlotte “Sarge” Sonnenfeld, the teacher of that class. Bless you, Sarge, wherever you may be.)
In junior high, I took one of the lower math classes for my grade because I was struggling with math. It turned out to be one of the best math classes I ever took. The teacher went through balancing the checkbook, APR, how to handle fancy advertisement percentages, and all sorts of stuff. And because most of it had to do with money, most of the kids were interested in learning it. Practical math - what a sight.
Also in junior high, I took a home economics class that was a joke. They put the oldest, most doddering teacher at the helm and the ship all but sank. The woman really couldn’t handle teaching anymore. It would have been nice to learn some practical home things then, which I have learned since. Cooking is actually pretty easy if you follow the recipe. Some basic sewing should be taught to everyone, since everyone is going to lose a button along the road of life.
I think there are a lot of things that students would benefit from learning, if not in junior high then surely before they graduate high school. Learning how to make a resume or how to track down a good apartment are only some of the things I have in mind.
I have always wished that the school system took speech (as in, speaking) classes more seriously. People would benefit immensely from learning how to actively listen to a person’s argument, how to form their own, how to rebuff without acting like a snotty little kid.
I have also wished that CPR and first aid were requirements at every high school. I don’t see why they’re not, given how all-around useful they are.
I do feel that real life skills should be taught in school. It has seemed to me that my schools haven’t been serious about teaching students real life skills.
We were required to have three years of math when I was in high school. I chose Algebra, Geometry and Accounting. My junior year I was looking for classes to fill up empty spots in my day ( I hated study halls ). I took consumer math. Generally thought to be the class that kids who struggled with math took. It was great. We had the imaginary jobs, balanced check books, played the stock market. The most important thing about that class was that it was fun. The teacher who taught the class understood that the way to have kids pay attention was to get them involved, show them rather than just tell them how to do things. I learned more from that class than I did in Geometry.
From reading what a few other posters have written, I think the key is in the teachers. Some teachers venture outside of what is in the text books to teach real life things. Bless them. I know there are parents out there who “don’t have time” to be involved in their children’s educations. Teachers take on a tremedous responsibility. Often they spend more time with out kids than we parents do.
We had stuff like this at my high school. We had a class called life skills earlier on, which was mostly about conflict resolution, and how to deal with lame teenage problems like someone drunk at a party offering you a lift home or that girl you like going off with you best friend. I think it was some naive administration attempt to prevent youth suicide or something.
We had compulsory home economics classes in year 7 and 8, and in year 12 we had some Careers course where you… well I don’t know. I didn’t really show up for those.
The problem is, apart from Home Ec., they were all sham classes. You’d get a worksheet, fill it out half-assedly and then use the period to catch up on gossip or listen to a cd or (if you were particularly studious) do your homework. Kids know that it’s maths and science and english and your electives that are going to get you into university, so they won’t bother putting in the effort for a life skills course.
It sounds like a great idea, but when you actually get down to teaching it, it’s extraordinarily lame. I mean, take the suggestion to teach manners. You’d get a sheet with a story on it.
“Someone pushes in front of you at the canteen. What do you do”
You fill out “discuss the problem without resorting to violence,” and you’re done for the period.
Like it or not, life skills are something you learn by living, not by some teacher lecturing you on them.
Well folks it is not so much teaching manners that is the core of what I am asking in the OP. The more I read peoples responses I think that students should be taught how much money and money management will rule their lives. Credit scores are just the beginning. High schools can teach courses on how to balance a check book, and come up with a budget, but from what I understand they do not teach living with bills. Behaviors that can ahrm you when it comes to your financial health.