It coincides with those things, too.
All the more reason to be exposed to and study ‘long form’ literature. Not every student is going to read fiction outside of the required reading for class but if they aren’t even introduced to it, the attentional focus and critical analysis required for reading and interpreting fiction will become a lost skill.
Stranger
Speaking as the child of two teachers (college) and husband of a teacher (my wife taught through her Masters and PhD work), I think that we have historical problems with teaching to a one-size-fits-all style. Not everyone learns at the same rate, or at the same rate across subjects. And yet there’s this demand from the Political PTB to somehow force everyone through, at the same rate, at the same time. It hasn’t worked well for a while, but, I grant it’s a nice metric that those PTB can point at on a graph and say they’re doing something.
Three things that would help to start.
- A longer day, and/or shorter summer breaks. If you need more time during the course to teach, or you need to teach more subjected, including the aforementioned finances, you’re going to need more time. If you have a longer day, you can fit in more classes, or if you have a shorter summer, you can expand a bit more on some of these subjects by way of your “default” classes. When I was in Jr. High, our Government and Civics Class had three periods (!) of stock market basics, which, well, certainly wasn’t enough. Drop Summer break to, say, 6-8 weeks, and you can spend more time on everything. And in the day and age of single parent or dual working parent households, that may well be a big benefit to parents as well.
- If we are going to ask the schools to teach more, we need to ask the parents to interfere less. It’s a hot button topic, I know, but if schools are being asked to teach subjects traditionally taught by family and friends, because those others are too busy, then, you are going to need to acknowledge they’re going to be taught a metric ton of reality (okay, not in Texas where they demand their own textbooks, but that’s another rant worthy topic). Of course, this will lead to it’s own problems, like an increasing segment of parents who “homeschool” their kids without ANY of the skills to do so, often in a way that leaves them completely unequipped for anything resembling independent life. Yet another thread.
- Money. Mooolah. $$$. Greenbacks. Every single teacher I’ve known has been paid a trivial amount. My wife considered teaching when she got her Masters and PhD. She mostly enjoyed it, and the interactions. But IF she could get a full time job (they mostly hire adjuncts) without moving, the pay would have been around $40k. Instead, she got a job in industry for more than twice that within a month of graduating. And that’s not counting the teachers who are constantly spending their own money for school supplies to share with kids, or new material to update their own skills/knowledge, or any number of expenses. And I’ll also not mention all their unpaid time they spend working evenings and weekends to take care of the stuff that happens in the day. Especially if we go with longer school days/and or longer school years, they need more money, as do the schools themselves.
If this was in P&E, I’d admit that this all has a snowballs chance in hell to happen in the USA under current trends. Since we’re talking about what, how, and how long we should be teaching however, it’s fair game.
I don’t know enough about an average school’s curriculum to opine as to what classes should be cut to allow “life skills” courses, but I think at least a section on personal economics in grade/middle school and a semester in HS would not necessarily be a bad idea.
Way back in the stone age, grade schools used to teach “Home Economics” as well as “Civics.” I don’t think it is harmful to give grade school kids a semester in personal finance, sewing, cooking, and another in how to be a decent contributing member of society.
Like I said, I am not familiar with what is required in today’s schools, but my impression is that they offer quite a few classes that are IMO less important than what I call Home Ec and Civics. My non-teacher impression is that for some time, curricula and schedules have been designed to reflect some latest theory of pedagogy, when a more rigorous teaching of “basics” would serve many kids better.
Looking at the middle school down the block, courses I personally could sacrifice include:
keyboarding, technology/computer applications, guitar, art history, music theory. Don’t imagine that I do not value art and music. I could imagine allowing kids the opportunity to test out of Home Ec and Civics.
Sure, parents should do more. But across the board a tremendous percentage of parents are fuckups at personal finances and social participation.
And I agree that the school day/year likely should be longer.
Many agree with you … until they realize they have to pay more taxes to pay teachers for the extra work time. If teacher pay were on par with 8 hour/day 52 weeks/yr you would have to increase our pay by almost 90%.
Depends on the school district, I’m sure. Speaking solely WRT the school districts immediately around me, I do not perceive the grade, middle, and high school teachers as overworked and underpaid. Hell, they could handle the extra classes just by cutting down on the BS “in service” days.
I also agree, tho, that the system of local taxes funding schools is horrible. And teachers are tasked with doing way too many things that ought top be beyond their purview. And if our society’s values were not completely out of whack, teachers would get paid more, and any number of occupations would be paid less (or perhaps the wealthy persons in those occupations taxed much more.)
I think things like economics, financial management, media literacy etc should be taught, but not as a required course in high school. Most subjects with any kind of endurance begin way, way, sooner than that, and progressively build on previous knowledge from year to year, which increases the chance it will be cemented in the brain.
I would pay taxes to send my kid to school year-round, but the people in my county voted against funding the fire department, so I’m not holding my breath.
They’re teaching kids telekinesis these days?
Man, school has changed a lot since I was a student.
No argument from me with the idea that teachers should be getting higher salaries and school systems should higher budgets.
One thing I’ve heard across the board is that the decisions should not be made by people who have never worked in the trenches. The same is true in healthcare.
Transitional Kindergarten. For kids not quite old enough for regular kindergarten.
Well, okay, but my version was more interesting.
I don’t have anything against teaching personal finance in high school, but one issue is that high school students aren’t usually at a point in life when they can put it into practice immediately, so what they learn may not stick. Lots of them don’t have jobs yet, the ones who do have jobs don’t get benefits, they aren’t yet at the point where they’re thinking about retirement or have to make meaningful financial decisions in general. (Mostly, anyway. A lesson on how student loans work and why they aren’t free money might be good for seniors, but it would have to be targeted to the ones who can make use of it.)’
Granted, there’s a lot of other stuff people learn in high school that doesn’t stick either, so that’s not necessarily a big objection, but it’s something to consider.
Yeah, as you point out, maybe 80% or more of what is currently taught in high school today is stuff that students won’t make much use or need of anyway. For instance, relatively few of them are ever going to work in a career where they must remember every day what valence electrons do, or what makes Avogadro’s Number important, or use math beyond simple arithmetic and algebra.
So since most of high school education has relatively little daily use, teaching personal finance, health/fitness, mental well-being, or nutrition, current-day politics, etc. is much more relevant than nearly any other course.
Mmm. I’d say it’s a mistake to concentrate too much on whether people remember facts, when the whole point of education is to train your intellect more broadly – reading books that expand your vocabulary and the range of ideas you have access to, doing the sort of math that requires you to problem-solve, learning how to debate and consider multiple sides of an issue. I can imagine a personal finance class that does train the intellect that way, which is why I’m not against the idea in principle, but lots of other math classes can do that too, and some types of math may be better at it.
Would one of the teachers here (or parents of teens currently in high school) mind outlining what is currently taught in high school, and which bits are optional? For the non-Americans like me, and because it has probably changed quite a bit since most Dopers were in school.
I think also, even vaguely remembered facts learned in school can help you make sense of things you hear on the news or read in the paper. Why some aspect of government works as it does, where in the world country X is and why it is friendly or hostile towards the US, what the latest science discovery means. Ideally what you learn in school provides a framework into which new facts can fit and be contextualised, rendering them meaningful rather than disconnected trivia.
Besides that, you need to learn the basics before you can understand things like compound interest. Especially in maths, one skill builds upon another, so it’s essential to have that background.
Poor kids. Adults already have to spend so much time at work, we could at least let children and teens have more time for themselves. I think we underestimate how many important skills are learned outside school, too.
100% agree with this, though. People aren’t identical products you can churn out on a production line, and ignoring that has been very harmful to children. Unfortunately, schools have been going in the wrong direction on this.
Teaching anything touching on the culture war is now about as controversial as teaching religion in school, so yeah, this is a strike against adding subjects like critical thinking to the curriculum (quite apart from the fact no one actually knows how to teach it). But it wouldn’t be an issue for adding a financial management course, would it?
Things that are taught in school tend to be the kind of things that can be taught best in a classroom setting, by experts trained in the subject matter. This is often not the case for “life skills” kinds of things.
Those “life skills” are also often not things that every teenager is going to care about (are poor kids without any money going to care about investing in stocks?), and/or things that may change substantially over time (with changes in technology, society, etc. changing what we need to know how to do, and how).
Shouldn’t almost every subject teach, in its own way and however indirectly, propositions and arguments are assessed and proven/disproved? They’re all different ways of learning how to learn.
I think a lot of people grew up and realized “nobody told me how to do my taxes” and they want to use this as a cudgel to get rid of Shakespeare.
There’s no point teaching kids how to do taxes! Teach them arithmetic, it generalizes to everything. Tax law changes every year anyhow.
High schools teach a good amount of things the kids may never really use in their adulthood. But it is a pretty good bet they are going to own a phone and a car, rent or own housing, get a job, pay taxes…. I don’t see the harm in trying to introduce them to some very basic aspects of any of those. How often do you encounter something and think, “Gee, I remember SOMETHING about that from back in school.” Why not instill such memories about personal financial responsibility?
Sure, folk will likely forget specifics by the time they need to use them. But there is a chance they might recall some broad brush strokes that will help them in the future. How insurance works. The importance of contributing to a retirement plan from a young age. Basic aspects of contracts. Avoiding carrying a balance on credit cards. The true costs of various forms of borrowing - especially student loans…