Math teacher for three decades.
I take offense at people that make stupid financial decisions and them blame schools for not teaching them personal finance. That was not our job, but now in some states it is. We have long taught pure mathematics which serves the real-life needs of like 10% of our students. Over the years, there has been a movement to include more applied math in the curricula. Now it is easy to say schools should be teaching real-life skills but wait a minute
If we do that, when will students experience Shakespeare? Learn about the Roman transition from Republic to Empire? How roots and factors of polynomials are related? The different colors elements produce hen burned?
Most teachers really suck at real-life. Are you going to pay the taxes to buy these super-expensive curricula? Are you going to justify paying teachers less because it’s just pre-made powerpoints and handouts? Or can them and hire financial advisors, career coaches, car salespeople, &c.?
The big philosophical question: whose responsibility is it to teach children real-life skills? Parents or teachers? And I can learn about buying a car and not getting screwed on Youtube just like you can learn to change your oil and knitting. Do you really need school to teach that? What I have seen is that in 2025, people that lack life skills often do not want to learn, just complain.
Many students lack even basic academic skills. If schools do not teach these, how are we going to help them be lifelong learners, go to college, write a coherent sentence in a report to their boss?
Let’s open the debate. Give 2025 what should schools be teaching and why?
When I was in school back in the 70s they had business classes that students could take to teach them about managing money, investing in stocks and bookkeeping. Most students either didn’t take more than the beginning entry business course that was required. But I know lots of people that started out in bookkeeping with just high school courses and went on to become accountants.
Problem is that no one forced kids to take those courses. Another issue was that many kids concentrated on courses for college entrance, business courses were seen as courses for low level office jobs and for girls to become secretaries. Guys not going to college took shop, girls took business or home ec.
In 2025 the schools need to make these courses required, not just electives.
Basic life skills should be taught by parents. But we don’t live in an ideal world where every parent knows these skills or has the time or inclination to teach them to their children. So basic life skills should be included in the public education system.
I don’t see the problem here. My parents taught me how to drive a car. But we also had a class in school where you could learn to drive a car if my parents hadn’t taught me. I don’t see any reason why learning how to open a bank account or learning how to unclog a toilet is any different than learning how to drive a car.
But….do they need to? I’m going to piss off English-lits but I don’t feel that reading Hamlet and Macbeth, as assigned, enriched me meaningfully to any extent. I’m not saying Shakespeare is worthless, but it’s distant-enough-unrelated that it should be reserved for college majors who choose to major in literature. It shouldn’t be forced on high schoolers.
Like in the other thread: It would be nice if students could be compelled to read everything and do everything - but everyone gets only 24 hours in a day and 365 days in a year. If we made every student learn everything that has even slight value, they’d have to learn ancient Greek, ancient Aramaic, ancient Latin, ancient Hebrew, etc. With the limited time and energy that teens have, schools should “budget” their attention against their needs very carefully. It’s not unlimited time.
Also, why would real-life curriculum be “super-expensive,” per the OP? It doesn’t cost any more to teach students about real estate and medical debt than it costs to teach them about the Ottoman Empire.
They don’t have to buy them from outside sources. A personal-finance teacher could certainly find cheap alternatives, or even just go to the whiteboard with a marker pen and explain, off the top of his head, to his class how payday loans are a terrible idea, how a mortgage interest can cost almost as much as the house price itself, the difference between PPO and HMO health insurance, why you need to put money into your 401k at as young an age as possible, etc.
Again, there are few teachers that could do this. We are not trained to teach personal finance nor tested on it. There seems to be a presumption in this country that parents don’t know personal finance and can’t teach it to your kid, but the PE teacher can.
Teachers can teach students things like French and Algebra and Ancient Roman History. I’m going to assume that teachers could teach students things like driving or personal finance or plumbing. Obviously some teachers would have to learn these subjects themselves before being able to teach them. But the same is true of subjects being currently taught. If a teacher can learn enough French to teach it then I believe a teacher can learn enough personal finance to teach it.
Your assumption is wrong. We are neither trained nor tested on that. There is no plumbing endorsement, no driving endorsement. You would quite literally have to redefine the teacher credentialing programs across the country to guaranty those skills are available. On my campus, no one could teach basic plumbing, basic home electrical work, or basic carpentry.
Except we learned those before becoming a teacher. So you would need to credential a person that a priori had a background in personal finance.
Are you going to pay me (through your taxes) to learn plumbing so I can become a plumbing teacher? Or am I expected to take my time and pay for classes on my dime?
There was a time we talked about the first task of the schools was to start with the students and build out from there. Compulsion rarely works the way we think it will. Heck, bombing people didn’t make them surrender but steeled their resistance. Forcing students to do X, Y, and Z may not work any better. The point of much schooling is to turn out willing consumers, eager cannon fodder, and dutiful workers, and until we get past that, any “dream curriculum” is wishful thinking and intensely political, that is, wrapped up in competing values. In that competition, those with money, power, and authoritarian mindsets tend to win, but might doesn’t make right.
You’re not forced to deal with months of insurance-related paperwork and phone calls if you accidentally make slight, momentary contact with a nearby object while unclogging a toilet.
I’d say the biggest problem in K-12 education today is poor parenting. The fact is teachers are far better trained, go through way more professional development, and are held far more accountable than the teachers or yore, yet students are learning less than ever. We have far more tests, far more analysis, and far more curriculum adjustment than ever before. We have a plethora of support staff; paraprofessionals, sociologists, psychologists LBS1 special ed experts, and specialty schools.
To combat the age 0-5 debacle that is going on in many homes, we are now taking 3-year olds in our Pre-K program so that they have TWO years of Pre-K and then kindergarten before ever reaching first grade. This is helping, but some of these “parents” are so horrible that we should be collecting the kids in the delivery room. Unfortunately, that isn’t possible.
I also had such a class in high school, as did my wife, in a completely different state. They’re all gone now. I don’t know of a single public high school that still offers driving classes.
A surprising amount of the words you use and many of the metaphors are derived from Shakespeare. It’s a foundational element of storytelling in English language cultures and a representation of tropes in entertainment, and it isn’t as if the common plays like Romeo and Juliet or A Midsummer Nights Dream are difficult to follow. Enough of education is strictly vocational in nature that I don’t see a need to strip out a basic introduction to cultural milestones.
As far as teaching practical skills, it would be easy to put together a curriculum that involves cover basic personal finance, writing a resume, basic interviewing and public speaking, critically evaluating news and social media, et cetera. We spent two semesters in health/hygiene classes where they stretched out, “Wash your hands, brush your teeth, use a condom, and go see a doctor if something hurts” into a full class, and four years of ‘physical education’ where I can’t recall learning a single useful skill beyond how to avoid getting cornered in the shower. The difficult problem is getting students to pay attention to these lessons but then that is the basic challenge of any teacher in any subject that isn’t gruesome or salacious.
Yeah, a lot of school administrators sometimes come across like religious-fundamentalist parents or pastors, even if unintentionally - “If you force them to do it, they’ll love it.” When in fact it can backfire and have the effect of “vaccinating” students against a particular topic. Forcing them to study Bach or Mendelssohn against their will may just make them reject classical music once they graduate and say “Never again.”
Certain things must be learned, of course. But for other things that aren’t essential, they should be electives, up to the student to choose.
It’s not impossible for some aspects of life skills to be learnt in traditional subject teaching. Maths can explain the concepts you meet as a consumer and voter (averages, percentages, probabilities ), civics comes in from history, EngLit can lead to discussion of behaviours and beliefs, and so on.
I suspect the key issue here is not so much about making room for new content as focussing on concepts rather than piling up facts for regurgitation.
Or, if I may say, of interest to the student. A colleague once literally taught a course on kite making for a student who was keen to lie in a park and watch the kite. Once the student asked “so why does the kite stay up?” the hook was set. Said student became a pilot.
We need more people reading, not fewer. The US illiteracy rate is something like 40%. The percentage of people reading fiction is in perilous decline, which incidentally coincides with the rise of a culture that outright rejects empathy and is enthusiastically banning books - because that’s how important literature is. It’s important enough that fascists know they better censor it. Reading fiction creates more empathetic, and therefore more compassionate people. It you want to do conservatives’ work for them, just don’t expose young people to any ideas they find challenging, and definitely keep them from opportunities to imagine what it’s like to be a different person.
Based on my experience in my English classes, we don’t need less literature, we need to teach literature better than we are.