Schools shouldn’t be treated as these magical places where you’re put in at some age and over a decade later you emerge a complete human being. You have parents and you spend more time at home than at school for a reason: you’re supposed to learn from your parents.
A school can potentially give you a degree of financial literacy instruction. Your parents should be the ones paying your allowance money and driving you to the bank to get your first checking account. A school can teach you how to cook something. Your parents should be the ones eating your food and helping you cook it better. A school can show you some level of DIY. Your parents should directly benefit from teaching you how to fix the sink when it gets clogged. A school can tell you what kinds of careers exist. Your parents should love you enough to tell you that either your career ambitions or your financial expectations need to change. A school can tell you how to build a resume. Your parents should be the ones driving you to your job interview and to your job until you buy your first car. A school can give you a failing grade when you do poorly on a test. Your parents should be able to make you face the real, in-the-moment consequences of doing something wrong.
Expecting a school, public or private, to teach you everything you need to know is a grave mistake. You need people in your corner who are taking an active part in raising you all the way to adulthood and beyond. If you have kids yourself, that goes for them as well. If you aren’t there for your children, to teach them the things that schools don’t teach because they can’t mass produce the lessons to nearly the same quality that you can give them, they’ll blame you and the school for having failed them. And they’d be right to lay the blame at your feet.
I’m glad my parents didn’t teach me how to cook because if they had, my cooking would fucking suck.
Dude thinks everyone has parents like him, elaborates that no learning of vital information in school is necessary if he himself got the knowledge from his parents.
Many people’s parents are not present in their lives at all or don’t have these skills themselves to be able to pass on. What you’re proposing will just result in more people growing up without these skills. School should teach a person everything they need to know for adulthood to ensure that everyone has the chance to learn it. If your parents reinforce those lessons even better.
There are no prerequisites for being a parent. There are MANY prerequisites for being a teacher. We should be fortifying the curriculum of our schools to give ALL students a good education, not allowing the birth lottery have as drastic of an effect on children as it currently does. Parents can be very helpful or nearly useless and schools should do their to help students recover from the failures of bad/unprepared parents
At the same time, parents should teach/reinforce all the lessons they think are critical, and not depend on an imperfect school system to do right by their child. If it’s something your kid should know and be familiar with, teach it to them. If they already know about it from school, find out what they were taught and be careful to consider what’s wrong and what’s simply different from when you were taught it.
Kids should have no expectation on who should teach them what. They don’t really have a say in the matter, they’re children. Everyone responsible for those children needs to do everything they can to make sure the children get a fair shot once they start having a little more control over their own lives.
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I would argue that your points about kids not caring and forgetting information are not inherent to the concept of education, but to how most places do formal education.
Humans learn best through practical examples that affect their lives, and through doing things. Sitting people down and giving them information, and then later having them regurgitate that information, is just not the best way. It’s cheaper, it requires fewer teachers and fewer resources, but it is not the most effective.
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And what if one has shitty parents?
I mean the reverse also applies. What if one has a shitty school?
In my opinion every school should receive top funding regardless of neighbourhood to make differences negligible.
Dude, in a non-gender-specific way of course, I am fortunate enough to be a homeowner and such a huge percentage of my taxes go towards the schools in my area and they are still very poorly rated.
I don’t even have children, and I don’t think that that should grant me special exemptions because I want to live in a world with educated people so I pay my taxes to contribute towards that, but I’m literally paying $1,000 a year for the schools in my area to have money and they still suck.
No, it’s really not the same thing. You can legislate better schools with a variety of methods, the main point being that you’re regulating government jobs(to oversimplify). You’re more limited to negative legislation for parents, such as punishing child abuse. I guess you could technically legislate certain mandates for parents to be better parents, but like, good luck passing said legislation. And even if you do(and this is the big boi), how the fuck do you enforce that??? And on top of even that, how can you be sure parents will be qualified/able to teach their kids such a wide variety of skills? You can fire teachers for incompetence and publicly investigate school districts for failing to faithfully implement good practice. And it should also be mentioned that shifting these expectations (especially via legislation) onto parents will disproportionately burden the poor who will be less likely to have the time, skills, or knowledge to teach said things.
In theory, sure.
But in basically any third world country, you’ll find all the government schools are awful, and it would be absurd to rely on them to teach you life skills. Parents are about the same though
in basically any third world country, you’ll find all the government schools are awful
This is because it’s designed to create disparate outcomes; the capitalist class who determines policy want their kids to get a better education than the working class. There’s also ideology at play; liberalism demands privatization, even when it makes the system less stable in the long term.
Vietnam consistently scores similarly to the US with a tenth of the budget, Finland does significantly better, with only slightly smaller budget.
This is because those countries designed their school system to educate everyone.
And what if one is only able to visit a shitty school?
Your right though, one should have easy access to good education no matter what kind of home they are from.
Public policy can/should fix shitty schools. You ‘just’ need funding, staffing, and leadership, plus to some extent a willingness to ride roughshod over parents who willingly avoid teaching e.g. science, sex ed.
Public policy can only do so much about shitty parents.
Some of your examples are just senseless. People don’t have DIY skills because of the increasing specialisation of our society. We’re not at home learning how to fix things, because we’re in school learning how to do other things instead.
This has been the case for so long in some places that a lot of peoples parents don’t have those skills to pass on in the first place.
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There are some topics that are just boring and not relevant to kids, even if those topics are important for them later as adults.