Posted on 04/13/2021 3:06:01 PM PDT by Olog-hai
We all remember the endless hours spent in our school classrooms learning about declensions, trigonometry or the French future perfect tense.
But it turns out that adults really wish they had been taught practical life skills such as how to change a tire, write a CV or plaster over holes and cracks.
Money worries headed up the top 20 list of what parents wish they had learned at school — namely how to save cash, advice on budgeting and how to invest.
The survey of 1,000 parents revealed that how to cook everyday meals and how to start a business were also among skills they regretted not developing. […]
The research, commissioned by online learning service 8billionideas, found nine in ten parents thought self-care skills were more important in adult life than algebra. …
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
I remember a time when parents taught the life skills.
When I was 16 years old (1968) I had my own car, an after school job, a bank account and a girlfriend. No brag, just fact.
Parent’s job.
It doesn’t take a village, it takes two parents....of the opposite sex.
Agree, this sort of learning comes from the parents. I was lucky enough to learn about hard work and the value of the dollar. Thank you Mom and Dad.
But it comes with a lot of homework.
Much of the teaching is pushed onto homework/parents because the schools are not doing their jobs.
Life skills are taught by parents who model it....oops forgot what the left did to our families. It is sad we expect our schools to teach us how to address an envelope and balance a checkbook
My life skills were taught at home and when I didn’t follow the instruction, a paddle, belt or switch was used as a corrective measure, just to reinforce the instruction...
In 1986, pretty much the same except a jalopy CJ5 and no gf.
That 304 stayed thirsty for gas and oil. Just as well.
Most of us learned life skills without a need for a special course. Actually, they used to have special schools for genuine certified retarded people which actually taught them them life skills.
Yesterday’s kids, immersed in pubic schools, video screens, sugared foods and fatherlessness, are now grown up and wishing they’d learned life skills.
They’re obviously learning now, unavoidably, how much they don’t know — a real eye opener. Probably painful.
Tail-end Boomers are going to be retiring before long, and a whole lot of their jobs will be difficult to fill with today’s younger ones; critical infrastructure jobs in many cases. We’re quietly working away (many with great job security even in our 60’s), and have a lot of unsung skills (developed over many decades from life, mistakes, OJT and sel-learning).
Interesting times are coming, in many ways...
There is no way to have a class about how to be ambitious enough to get off your ass and figure things out for yourself.
Ah the mysteries of academia.
Remember that imaginary numbers actually work.
And yes, you can add an infinite amount of numbers and still get a non infinite answer.
But you’ll NEVER get socialism to work.
Or find an intelligent studies major.
Hybrid is probably the best answer for middle through high school.
Have the basic courses online. Lecture can be prerecorded video.
Have one recitation session per class per week for Q&A and progress monitoring. Students will advance through the course at different speeds and that’s OK.
Labs would probably still need to be in person. As COVID has demonstrated, you CAN do microscale versions of labs at home if you have to, and you can even use a simulated lab online, but let’s face it, the cool stuff that really motivates needs a proper lab.
So that’s one or two meetings a week for each class compared to the five we have now.
For the sake of academic integrity, exams would need to be monitored somehow. There are so many ways to cheat even when having a webcam on that having a testing center for exams with a proctor might make more sense. Teacher just sets a date and time and students check themselves into their local exam centers and take it.
Now realize I would have been much better off learning to build a log cabin rather than taking French language classes.
And I really haven’t ever needed my Algebra I & II and Geometry skills. Wish instead I had learned to repair a car.
Of course, some people will say I could have learned those skills on my own time. But life got in the way, and I didn’t. Would have been much better to have learned those things in my early teen years (and no, my parents didn’t have those skills to pass on to me).
Academic studies=Crackpot Marxist dog-twaddle.
What they really missed was the sense of personal responsibility.
Ultimately it’s the same problem as the teaching of life skills though. Parents and family used to both teach those things AND serve as role models to get off your ass and do something. These days it’s all outsourced to the public schools and entertainment and sports celebrities and the result is a bunch of unmotivated and ignorant fools.
I failed algebra in HS. My only F. A and some B all other classes.
No one ever asked me about my grades.
I took the full three year auto mechanics program.
This modern era stuff is a little beyond me but I can work on most of my vintage autos. An occasional YouTube refresher helps.
Then there’s the German way, which is to figure out by the time you’re 14 whether you’re going to be working with your mind, your craft skills, or your muscles, and spend your high school years preparing accordingly.
At least half the population does not need a high school education in order to survive in the modern world; they just need a trade that other people will pay up for. I had a man replace the water pump on my dishwasher today, and he is just as necessary to society as is my gen-ed college professor work; I respect his skill as much as he respects mine, even if he never solved a quadratic equation or wrote a paper summarizing three scholarly articles in APA 8.0.
Wood shop (10) Metal shop (11) and Electrical shop (12) were the most useful courses I took in high school. The girls had to take Home Economics for three years, some of them actually learned to cook.
All 3 required.
The shop in my high school has been turned into an SAT prep center.
I did OK on the SAT and the MCAT without prep, and I’ve been a doctor for 45 years.
The three shop classes are still very useful. Wish they had plumbing shop, too. My joints still leak, and those guys make more than I do.
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