WOW, I think you’ve seriously underestimated your education…or maybe you only get out what you put in.
That’s it!
Not to mention learning to work in different ways with different teachers, and groups of children.
Becoming flexible and adaptable as I experienced new ways of doing the same things year after year.
How to organise my time efficiently.
How to critically anaylse text to find accurate information.
It’s not all about the three 'R’s, not any more!
The other thing that I believe that people tend to overlook is that compulsory education isn’t really, in this day and age, about giving the student the skills to perform their life’s work whatever that may be. It’s about laying a groundwork so that they can learn what their life’s work will be, and learn how to perform that job.
The OP says that reading and writing are all he got out of his compulsory education. Even if that’s true, would the OP be able to do his/her job now without that groundwork? I really don’t think so.
Then there are the little courses that one takes, like typing/keyboarding* that others have mentioned. And included in the reading and writing the OP mentions there’s learning to think critically about what one reads. Even learning how to present a coherent argument. Things that are vital, I believe, to most jobs, now. But when one looks back at one’s compulsory education, it’s easy to miss them as being part of that reading and writing thing.
*I will agree, however, that this has to have been the most-used single course’s skill sets that I took from my HS days. (Driver’s Ed was something I had to pursue after school - my school (and most schools in the state of Massachusetts, AIUI) didn’t offer Driver’s Ed.)
Also compulsary spelling.
Perhaps I should mention that I base my OP on my own schooling, which was in the north-west of England. Streets apart from ‘good’ British schooling, and probably worlds apart from American schooling.
Giving presentations is something I had to do at College. Only once at school. We don’t have ‘show and tell’ in the UK (well not in my school)
Doing research is something I learned mostly at college and University (both non-compulsary)
I really don’t credit my compulsary education for my appreciation of music.
Debate is natural to being human. Again I can’t credit my compulsary education for any debating skills I might have. I think the credit for that goes to a combination of my genes and my upbringing.
Sports: My sports schooling was pathetic. If you weren’t interested in the subject then the teachers weren’t interested in you. In retrospect I deeply truly wish my sports teachers had put some effort into encouraging their pupils to like what they were doing. More specifically I wish I had known I like cricket when I was 13 and doing it in PE.
Showing up on time and prepared. Yet again linked to being human. Things we understand as being advantageous without the benefit of something we may have gone through during compulsary education.
Maybe I’m just bitter about the particular compulsary education I had.
And if I am bitter about anything particular, it’s that it had nothing built into it to account for the fact that kids are too young and too distracted to be aware of their own potential.
I now (at 28) know what potential I had when I was (for instance) 14. I didn’t know it when I was 14. I didn’t know I had intelligence of any kind when I was 14.
Lobsang, as a victim of my own schooling*, you have my sympathies. I don’t think that your experience, or mine, invalidates the concept of the important of general education. It just means that there are teachers and schools who fail to live up to the standards they should be held to.
*I had teachers that must have come from the Hellmouth in the Buffyverse.
I myself wasn’t home schooled, but this is very :dubious:
I’m not a home schooler, myself. Nor do I think it’s necessarily any better or worse than schooling through traditional schools.
But this concern about socialization is a common one, from many people - not least being college educators. Here’s a Wikipedia article that outlines some of the criticisms. (And I’m perfectly willing to ignore anything said by the NEA, just the other comments.)
I think the most important thing I ever learned in school was that some authorities deserve to be authorities and others do not. In fact, some are remarkably stupid and ignorant.
My favorite thing!
On the one hand, I think you are absolutely correct about the groundwork thing. On the other, like** Lobsang** my education wasn’t much, and I learned most of that stuff on the fly or from my parents. I think that early education (pre-college) has been very stretched out; we could compress it and spend a lot less time in school, which is just marking time for a lot of kids. Or else we could actually start teaching writing, logic, and all that stuff in school…
(I do actually homeschool my kids, and we manage to see lots of other kids and work in groups and whatnot. I know a bunch of homeschooled kids (older than my 6-yo) who participate in local theater; homeschooling isn’t staying home all the time behind walls. It gives you a lot of extra time to be in the community, if that’s what you want to do. Anyway that isn’t the point of this thread; I just want to point out that homeschoolers aren’t all troglodytes who never see the light of day and never get to do theater.)
I learned a lot about good and bad teachers, which served me well in later years when I taught part-time.
Good teachers appreciate being corrected by a student when they’re wrong–if the student does it respectfully, that is. I had a fantastic calculus teacher who made all tests open book. If you actually had to look everything up, you’d never finish the test on time, and you’d fail. But if you needed a particular equation or derivation and knew your reference books well, you could look it up and use it on the test. His explanation was that it’s more important for you to know where to find an obscure formula ten years down the road than it is for you to try to memorize them all.
Um, how to shut up and keep out of trouble.
How to fear authority.
How to jump through hoops and otherwise do as I’m told.
How American society is nearly perfect, and how history is nothing but a steady progression of human improvement leading inevtably to today’s world as we know it.
How God love us but may send us to hell for any of a thousand different reasons (Catholic gradeschool).
My parents taught me to read and write before I went to school. I did learn basic math and science in school, but the best thing I learned in school was languages, specifically Latin and German.
French, how to sit still, how to BS, and not to talk about racial issues in public. And a bit of chem. Everything else I learned before it was “officially” covered in school.
Wish I’d taken typing! :smack:
Advanced math, up to and including basic calculus. Served me damned well in setting up my career path, and I used fairly advanced math on an hourly basis for years. To this day I can still perform fairly complex mathematical operations in my head.
Poetic analysis. Odd as it sounds, the ability to dissect a poem translates well into parsing and dissecting hidden or subtle messages in inter-office memos and e-mail. It’s also helpful for code-breaking the things that PR flaks and politicians say.
Reading. Goes without saying… Mind you, I toought my self, past a certain starting point.
Grammar does come in handy… Being able to write a coherent paragraph counts for a lot in corporate communications.
Creative writing. See above. 
Wish I’d paid more attention to spelling! :smack:
Basic scientific method. Incredibly valuable, in all manner of things, from my days as a Reactor Operator, to troubleshooting computers and software, to dealing with personal relationships - especially when raising kids!
Spanish. Not as useful as it could be, unfortunately, because I haven’t bothered to keep current.
How to sit still and do boring things when directed. Sometimes, knowing how to sit still and shut up is invaluable.
How to socialize with people I didn’t particularly like.
Besides reading, writing, and math, you learn general information about the world and country you live in. You learn something about your culture, and you learn the discipline of handling assignments, studying, projects, and so on.
You also learn spelling—“compulsory” for example.
Lobsang I’ve had horrible periods durig my education, as well. But I think you’re underestimating what you got out of even your worst times at school.
Only once during your primary and secondary schooling did you have to stand up in class and read a report, or talk about what your family did while on holiday? :eek: If that’s true, you have single-handedly canceled out every one of the hundreds of posts on this Board over the years about how bad U.S. schools are!
Mostly, perhaps. But studying before a test is a very rudimentary form of research. So is writing what we call a “term paper” (a project that takes place over a number of weeks rather than overnight), both of which are common in the primary grades, at least over here.
Liking music is natural. Having some understanding of its structure and being able to compare different forms of music generally requires some type of study.
Again, it’s a difference between what you do naturally, and a structured, formal, methodical development of your natural skills.
Then you can’t really fault your compulsory education for that. You were exposed to it, probably instructed in it, at least to a degree. You simply didn’t care about it until years later.
A lot of people don’t seem to believe showing up on time and being prepared is particularly necessary. Again, I’d say this is something you might have had a natural inclination for, but was reinforced (subconciously, at least) by the imposition of a structured day and consequences you might have suffered for not showing up on time and being prepared.
…I’m pretty good with a bo staff.