The importance of savings and investments, especially when you’re young.
And also that it’s okay not to like someone, but really fucking not okay to make you not liking someone the other person’s problem.
One more vote financial literacy.
Credit wcore, how loans and credit cards work.
And knowing gambling only works for the House.
So many daily small thzate kinda impossible to teach a whole class, but are easy to teach a single child (source: I work in a school):
- reading the clock. May sound weird, but some kids get it really early and quickly, some take more time. Thus pretty frustrating to teach the whole class
- tying shoes (I know too many kids with 8 or 9 years old who can’t tie a knot, shoes are a good starter)
- generally small motor skills (crafts, crochet, weaving, whatever you want…)
And the one thing that school cannot teach and is also very difficult for parents: questioning authority
questioning authority
Parent: make sure to question authority
Kid: why?
Parent: listen here you little shit…
And the one thing that school cannot teach and is also very difficult for parents: questioning authority
I’d widen it to: questioning ideals and argumentation
Small motor skills - you know what’s SUPER good at teaching this? Writing in cursive, it’s why it needs to stay in schools.
All the things listed are also easily teachable to groups - group exercises/worksheets and practice for clocks, tying shoes used to be considered standard to be taught at preschool/kindergarten it’s a matter of practice and cursive
What’s your experience with groups of children? You can show stuff. But repetition and practice are not a great thing in a school setting. That needs to happen outside of school. I’ve worked with far over thousand kids and worked in elementary schools for over 10 years now. Yes you can “teach” the things. But the kids need time and space for their own pace at repeating and practicing them
My mom was an early education teacher for over 30 years and this is all stuff she taught, she didn’t do cursive because that starts in second grade but letters, numbers, clocks, tying shoes/learning buttons, reading, zippers etc etc etc are all early educational norms. Granted I wasn’t the teacher but I was involved in it and helped her do her yearly syllabus and helped with in class projects etc.
It needs to happen inside and outside school. The issue is we don’t give teachers any authority and we don’t give parents any time to parent their kids.
I teach all of my kids that “no” is a complete sentence. I want them to be very conscious of consent, but I also want them all to respect their own wishes.
Unrelated, I also teach them all how to throw a good punch and keep their god damned hands up and chin down as soon as I think they have enough self control not to abuse it.
‘No’ is grounds for suspension at Bede Polding College, Australia.
Obligatory fuck Catholic schools, and the fascist teachers running them.
Do not pay for drugs in advance.
Have to get the dealer to answer their phone first.
In my case social skills. I was the typical nerd. About 10 years after I finished school I figured out I could learn to get along better with people just like I learnt how to do complicated maths.
Cooking, each generation is losing the skill.
I got taught that in school as well as all the basic nutritin stuff
Wouldn’t it be better to have affordable delivery food? Cooks focus on the cooking, regular people won’t have to spend so much time learning and doing cooking, and focus on their own work/play
A human is not an ant! We don’t have to specialize THAT hard! A person should be able to read, cook, clean, do laundry, hammer a nail, screw a screw, paint a picture, and write a poem, at the very least.
that list feels a bit outdated. What about write a simple program? Make basic 3d models and 3d prints? Some photography and video editing. Design a simple website. Even if you aren’t a tiktoker, these are fairly essential skills in the modern world. And if we’re throwing in poetry and painting, might as well throw in music, sports, sewing, gardening.
I’m not saying humans should specialize on a single skill. I just think people should be able to choose not to cook in favor of learning other skills. At a certain point, society should reach a point where somebody can say “I don’t need a kitchen in my house, I’ll just eat out all the time”.
The problem with your argument is that humans need to eat somewhere between 2 and 5 times a day. Nothing else on your list comes anywhere close to that level of frequency or importance. Just because you learn how to cook doesn’t mean you have to cook every meal either. You should still just know how to do it.
That being said, there is an economic line where this matters. If you make $100 an hour, and have the opportunity to work overtime, cooking is a waste of your time unless you’re batch cooking or just doing it for enjoyment. However, If you’re making $12 an hour, the time cooking likely saves you more money than you would make working and then using that to pay for meals out. The actual tipping point will change depending on your wage and the cost of food.
I’m a bit of a wierdo in this, I have not once in my almost 40 years of life ever ordered food delivered to me. I’ve gone out to eat, I’ve picked up takeout myself, but I have never had food delivered to my home. I make enough for that to make sense, but I just don’t.
But we also need to go to the toilet a few times a day. Doesn’t mean everybody should do some plumbling. Why can’t food be treated like a utility, like electricity and water?
The answer to that is yes… Everyone should be able to do a little bit of plumbing.
However you don’t need to a plumber every time you use the toilet so that’s a bad example.
The concern is scale, Someone cooks your food every time you eat. One person can only cook for a limited number of humans. It only takes a dozen people to actively provide water to every house in a city.
OK well if the concern is scale then I do think that is solvable. There is work being done to automate cooking more and more
Critical thinking skills - they’re actually very difficult to teach and constantly incorporating them into everyday life is super important
The easiest but most tricky way is through paranoia. It’s easier to look at the bigger picture of whatever you’re presented with if you always doubt the intentions of the one doing the presenting. Of course that could backfire by then doubting subject matter experts like doctors and physicists and end up becoming antivaxxers or flat earthers.
This is why teaching formal logic and basic philosophy should be right up there with critical thinking skills in general
This.
and for elementary school
Compound Interest.
and
If it seems to good to be true, you’re probably getting scammed.
You didn’t learn compound interest in school?
I did.
(i actually took AP Stats and learned a good deal more than that)
But many, many do not.
And it is of vital importance that that anyone in this … final stage capitalist / technofeudal dystopia understand it well.
The US education system at least has fallen off a goddamned cliff, average kid is now 3 years behind grade level in literacy, I think its similar with numeracy.
Shits gettin’ real bad, really fast… if you have kids, you need to make sure they understand compound interest.
How to be kind.
More for people entering adulthood, but one thing school life never taught me was how to deal with uncertainty and structurelessness. How to keep moving when you don’t know where you’re going.
Structure for my personal life at every level is still a skill I’m struggling with at age 45.
I feel like if I had been taught to plan my day and held accountable for it at an early age, it would come much more natural to me now at the micro and macro level.
Instead I just blame my lack of ability to organize on my work schedule, which truthfully only fluctuates by a couple hours at most.
It took me years to notice that I was spending much of my free time on ‘stretchy’ activities that stretched to expand whatever amount of time I had free. Turned out that they were dopamine traps and I have ADHD
Schools are obsessed with academics because they tend to be more easily measurable. Therefore, they are spending less time building character, morals, and thinking skills. Teaching them how to be a good person is more important than ever.
Financial literacy and responsibility, life skills: laundry, dishes, vacuuming, hygiene, cooking and recipe reading. General well being, teach them to be somewhat physical regularly and exercise with them to promote it more so.
As a teacher for a decade. Read a clock, understand geography, science activities, history activities. We teach out of a manual now, and it’s all so the admins can jerk off to higher scores for ELA and Math.
Wait in some countrys learning to read clock isnt primary school material?
- financial literacy
- teach them what money means and what their time is worth
- philosophy
- teach them about multifaceted perspectives, there isn’t good vs evil but multiple shades of gray
- resiliency
- impose upon them that failure only happens when you learn nothing from your mistakes, everything else is just a setback
- health and medical
- teach them about their body, what it means to eat nutrient rich meals, and first aid
- self-reliance
- when you’re the only person with a clue, you’re your only hope, be your own advocate and rely on your own skills and judgment
all the other things like ethics, empathy, emotional IQ, constructive thought, etc will fall into place with a basic understanding of the above. the point is to challenge them and provide a support system for when they fall.
- financial literacy
