This poll is headed for IMHO.
Sign language should be taught to kids when they first start school and they should use it somewhat in class every year to keep it fresh. Then when the next generation becomes deaf everyone could communicate with them as long as they had the use of their hands.
Yeah, so what?
I pay taxes to schools so they can teach scholastic material. I have kids and am quite prepared to teach the “soft skills” at home. If you’re a parent and aren’t teaching these things then shame on you.
And BTW, teaching also takes the form of “on the job training.” Kids learn by example. Pushing everything to the schools is a cop-out.
You guys went to some crappy schools. I must’ve had a primer in how to balance a check-book at least three times over my K-12 career, a mandatory semester-long home ec class in 8th grade, a health class that covered sex ed and nutrition in 9th grade, mandatory civics class in HS (can’t remember which year), and our economics class in HS covered investing and finance as well as the usual macro-economics stuff.
I kinda doubt my experience was that unique, I suspect that learning this kind of “practical stuff” is just so far divorced in time from when you have to actually use it, that kids don’t really have much reason to pay attention when its taught, and so five or ten years later when they open a checking account, or have earned enough money to invest in the stock market, or hit an age where they start gaining weight and so care more about nutrition, or start voting in elections or cooking for a family, they’ve forgotten most of what was taught to them. Certainly that’s true in my case, I can vaguely remember seeing all this stuff in school, but when it finally came up in my real life, there were only a few snippets of usable knowledge left and I ended up working most of it out on my own.
I went to public schools in the US in the 90’s, FWIW.
First aid courses.
I think that should be taught to everybody in high school, and some elements of it even much earlier.
You win the thread.
Sadly, just because you were taught it when you were going to school does not mean it is still being taught.
As for “the parents should teach them” – yes, I suppose they should, but as a society we still have a pretty basic interest in making sure they know these things whether or not the parents are inclined to teach them. What if the parents don’t know, which is hardly rare?
Ditto for me, except for the economics class.
Honestly, I think the problem is that most people are stupid. Some intelligent kids make it through school and excel in life. However, most stumble their way to graduation and fall flat on their ass in the real world.
We can drill “applied nutrition” into the kids’ skulls every year, but Fast Food marketing will override all of that knowledge in 30 seconds… Because one of those few intelligent kids grew up and aspired to make loads of cash by taking advantage of the stupid people and their appetites.
Now for a legitimate suggestion for this thread: Introduction to work ethics.
So, we institutionalize all learning? No way. Some things are better taught at home. If some parents are too lazy, or stupid to teach the basics to their kids then I’ll be fucked if my tax dollars should support the alternative.
No. It’s the kids who will be “fucked” just so you can score an ideological point. The parent won’t be harmed at all.
I forgot a big one for me.
Fundamentals of Health. (Hygiene) As in, Wash your hands! Vaccines are actually generally safe with very few true adverse side effects. Wash your hands! Cover your cough. Cover your sneeze. Wash your hands. Do not ‘double-dip’ a chip or other dip-able food. Do not cross contaminate foods your are preparing. Wash your damn hands. If you are going to have sex, at least keep the fun bits clean and or wrapped. After you use the restroom, wash your frickin hands.
I guess this could go along with my previous post regarding the teaching of science.
I also think a few people need to update their word choices. Young people today might never have an actual checkbook. They use a debit card instead. So, you need to learn how to balance your accounts, not balance your checkbook. A debit card makes it easier than ever to balance an account; it also makes it easier than ever to spend too much and not save. Some parents can not teach their kids about checking accounts etc., because they live paycheck to paycheck and have never had a checking account themselves.
How did you guys learn all this stuff, if your schools didn’t teach it? Are you really so enlightened that you have all this arcane knowledge that the rest of the world doesn’t have? Nobody ever says “I shouldn’t have taken algebra in high school.” They always say “that bozo over there should not have taken algebra in high school.”
My mom never taught me to cook. It’s not because she was stupid or seduced by fast food marketing. She was just a busy single mom with a poorly equipped kitchen. Anyway, I moved out, go sick of eating mac and cheese, bought a cookbook and learned to cook.
A good education will teach students to do just that- identify problems, find the resources to solve them, and the discipline to follow through. The actual content being taught is not all that relevant.
What could we get rid of to make room for this stuff?
I certainly didn’t need trigonometry or calculus. I was quite certain by the age of 14 that my career path would not included higher mathematics, although I was quite good at it. I have never needed any mathematical skills I learned beyond the age of about 10, except on standardized tests (MCAT, etc.)
History classes in England were really poorly designed. The material was essentially all British and European history, with the European stuff being important only inasmuch as it applied to British history. The material covered a period of about 2,500 years - 500 BC to World War II - but some 500-year periods were dispensed with in a week, and some decades got whole terms dedicated to them. I mean, it makes sense to cover Magna Carta in detail, for example, but who really gives a shit about which specific monasteries Henry VIII seized during the Reformation? Who cares about his wives, other than Catherine of Aragon?
English grammar rules are a complete waste of time. I could barely recite any of them by the time I was 11, and yet I was a better writer than any of my peers, according to my teachers. I mean, I could identify parts of speech, tense, mood, and so on, but I couldn’t name different types of clause and the like. Why? Because I read a lot. I could more or less intuitively identify and apply different words, sentence structures, and idioms because I’d seen them before. More time reading and speaking and less time reciting would work for kids. It’s how they learned the language in the first place, after all.
Perhaps counterintuitively, Latin was one of the most useful subjects I ever took - it was required at my (private) schools in England, and I continued it as an elective in US high school. I learned more about history than in most of my history classes, more about English than in most of my English classes, and more about other Romance languages than in many of those classes.
How bad is this? I remember a mythbusters where they tried to grow bacteria in a) salsa that had been irradiated (control) b) salsa that had been double dipped, and c) salsa that had been put into their mouths and then spit back out again. I seem to recall the conclusion was that not a whole lot of bacteria grew even in the case of c. Sure the vacc stuff and the bathroom things are important, but I think people get overly worried about germs sometimes. We have immune systems for a reason.
General home maintenance (how to rewire a lamp, how to hang a picture so it’s straight, how to replace a sink washer). Most men and many women get taught this by their parents, usually by their father, but there are those of us who didn’t. I have no idea if my father even knew how to do those things, but he sure as hell never did and wasn’t about to show me. Same with basic auto repair.
Much of it, I haven’t.
**
Applied Finance Math, or How to Balance a Checkbook/Fundamentals of Banking**
My mom taught me how to balance a checkbook back when I got one as a teen. Now with online banking, I just look online for any debits I don’t recognize and call the bank. I haven’t actually checked their math in years.
Firearms 1: Basic Knowledge, Safety and Laws (prerequisite . course for-)
Never learned it, beyond going to a shooting range with a boyfriend who kept me from killing anyone with very close supervision.
Firearms 2: Hands-on Instruction (elective, with parental approval)
Never really learned it, (see above). I can shoot a nice tight set of holes in a sheet of paper, but I wouldn’t begin to trust myself to take down a deer or an armed intruder.
Citizenship 1: Local & State government (what district you live in, who represents it, and what their voting record was since the last election.)
Never learned it. I look these things up when I need them, but I really wish I knew and understood more.
Citizenship 2: National government (who your senators and representative are, etc.)
These we did learn, in 8th grade, and had to pass a Constitution Test.
Applied Nutrition, aka Cooking 101
My mommy taught me. She’s got a minor in Nutrition and is an avid cook.
Critical Thinking
Didn’t begin to learn it formally until college, which, to judge from my classmates, is way too late. I consistently get good grades on critical thinking portions of exams, but I think that’s a natural talent like some people can play music by ear, not because I received an education in it.
Linguistics
I’m not even truly clear on what Linguistics is, or why it’s needed, so I think it’s fair to say I never learned it.
Geography
Don’t know, don’t care. Like a good American, I learn geography when we go to war with someone. 
**Insurance/Fundamentals of Insurance **
Don’t know, REALLY care. The best I can grok, insurance is a gambling scheme where I’m gambling against myself. I know I need it, but I can’t begin to figure out what’s best or what I need or even what I have.
Fundamentals of Investing.
Again, don’t know a thing about it, and I really wish I did. It just seems too daunting for this old dog to wrap her head around at this point.
First Aid/Fundamentals of Health
Some of this I got in school or just picked up from somewhere (television, books with survivalist themes, witnessing accidents and seeing what worked), but I didn’t really learn proper First Aid until I took a Basic First Aid for Healthcare Providers class required to enter nursing school, and I did a lot of reading to fill in the blanks so that I could volunteer at First Aid.
This I absolutely agree with, but since one must use examples to model the process, I think they might as well be useful ones. Even simply assigning “Investing in the New Millennium” as a research paper topic, instead of “Basketweaving in Ancient Egypt” would help.
Personal Finance- How checks work (or debit cards), insurance (like auto, term life v whole life, home ), loans, taxes.
Home Maintenance & Repair- what are common things that break down, how to know when to fix yourself vs call in a pro, how long appliances generally last, what to look for when you buy a house
Basic Personal Law- marriage, divorce, wills, what to do if arrested, contracts.
Refuting Republican Glurge Emails
I like the idea of these things being incorporated into other courses. The concept of measuring out ingredients for a recipe when you are learning fractions or showing how to balance a budget as part of a 6th or 7th grade math course would probably be a great way for kids to get as much of this information as possible without interrupting other coursework.
I took Home Ec and I use a lot of the sewing that I learned there and some of the cooking but I wish I could have taken a more intensive course on cooking/food prep. My mom grew up in a house where cooking meant dumping a bunch of stuff in a casserole dish and covering it with cream of mushroom soup so that is how she cooked and I missed out on a lot of instruction on proper cooking. I’m getting much better at it now but it has taken 5 or 6 years for me to learn what most people would consider the basics of cooking. Now I make a mean pot roast and an excellent baked potato soup but I have to search out new recipes and try them out on my own one at a time to improve my skills and I can see where someone my age with 2 kids and a hungry spouse may not have the time to try out a new recipe or be able to afford to scrap a food failure and order chinese to replace what should have been dinner. My fiance was in no better shape than I was either and had obviously been kicked out of the kitchen as a child so cooking seemed to be a mystery to him. We are learning together and it has been a lot of fun but we would have been much better off if either of us had learned to cook properly and not just how to bake a heart shaped cake in Home Ec.
Obesity is a problem in this country. The only bright spot is we’re no longer the fattest nation on Earth. (Thank you, Australia!) Obviously nutrition is not being taught, or at least taught well, at home. Kids don’t need to be taught in school how to cook. I’m self-taught, and reviews have been quite positive. But more emphasis needs to be placed on nutrition, and presented in such a way that it ‘sticks’. I’ve heard of kids who learn about nutrition in school and try to teach their parents. Occasionally parents will learn the lesson, but I suspect that they generally don’t. Obesity causes health problems and brings social ostracism. Health problems tend to become greater later in life, which increases the need for health care. Ignoring health problems when they are small is false economy. It is better to spend the money to remedy them early, than to wait until they require more expensive treatment. I think spending money on Nutrition will save money in the future.
This board is full of skeptics, and that’s a good thing. ‘Question Authority’, and all that. I’ve tried not to bring politics into this thread, but I want to suggest a couple of things. After 9/11/2001 the Administration linked the attacks to Iraq when they knew there was no link. I was paying attention at the time and was not fooled. But the majority of the country seems to have been. We just don’t seem able to process data, and I think more emphasis needs to be placed on Critical Thinking in schools.
Or take the housing bubble. I bought my house in 2003 when ‘creative’ mortgages were taking off. I reasoned that if interest rates were at record lows, then they must eventually rise. With a variable interest rate, I could not plan for the future since I didn’t know how much I’d be paying. So I opted for a standard 30-year fixed rate. Sure, my interest rate was 3/8% higher than it would have been otherwise, but I thought ahead to the time when rates would be higher. I heard about people who planned to sell their houses before the rate went up so they could make a large profit, but I also thought about the effect of thousands of houses suddenly coming onto the market. Had more people thought things through instead of being attracted by shiny things, we might have avoided the events of 2008 or their effects may have been mitigated. If Critical Thinking were taught in schools, more people may be equipped to see looming traps. Again, spend a little money now, save more money later.
Even if a student is going to go into a trade instead of pursuing higher education and a professional career (and the trades are crucial to economies) being able to analyse data makes sense economically and in a democratic nation.
My idea along these lines would be making Physical Education actually about … well, physical education. Rather than a focus on team sports, focus more on actual teaching of how to exercise, how to eat right, how to take care of yourself. Most adults who work out aren’t just playing kickball, after all - I think a lot of people would feel a lot more confident about joining a gym if they learned basic things like how to use weight machines and free weights, or even basic stuff like “these types of exercises build muscle, these types of exercises are cardio workouts”. Stuff to combat myths (e.g. women shouldn’t lift weights because they’ll look like freakish she-hulks) would be really helpful, too. You could even focus on techniques to exercise without a gym or equipment. Basically, take the mystery of how to maintain a healthy lifestyle into adulthood.