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.
Nah because many many parents totally fucking suck and don’t teach their kids shit.
That’s the problem. If parents didn’t suck, we wouldn’t have this genre of nonfiction.
Here’s one, from what does money derive its value?
I mean, its the most important thing in our society. You’d think that they would make sure it was really hammered home.
Now, you’ll be told that it has value simply because we believe it does which isn’t untrue. Theyll say, you know, it’s like gold that doesn’t actually hold any value. We just believe it really hard.
The problem is, we value that gold is shiny, imperishable and we can make pretty things out of it. We didn’t have a big meeting and just randomly decide that gold would be valuable.
Another problem is that money is an iou. Except its, apparently, an iou that isn’t own to anyone and doesn’t have to be repaid, making it fall short of the criteria for it being an iou.
Tbf our economists dont really need to think about that, as, due to how money is created and destroyed, the position nets off due to the debt being repaid, despite the above. Theres no need to consider the non hypothetical part.
What if the underlying asset was human labour? You know, like how cotton, sugar and steel used to be used as currency in Virginia, the west indies and Sheffield respectfully. Its just that we live in human labour farm and you’re living capital. To me, considering modern monetary policy, its the only thing that makes sense.
I would argue that more important than money in a society is trust. If you can’t trust your interlocutor to not screw you over/kill you, then you can’t have a meaningful economic transaction. If you can’t leave your house because the trust in your society is so low you’ll be robbed the moment you go out the front door, you’ll be unable to contribute to the local economy. If everything you buy online is so defective and distrustworthy that not even the most minuscule amount of money would be worth it, then online commerce would grind to a halt.
I think what we consider currency is a different topic, but to tie it back into the conversation about parenting, if you aren’t taught to trust the right people and distrust the wrong people, you’re going to be duped, swindled, and abused much worse in adulthood. This isn’t something we should expect a school to do for us. We need to show it to our kids ourselves.
How much money would it take to change your mind? I’m sure we could find a number.
Money by itself can’t change opinions, it can only change behaviors. You could pay me some absurd amount of money and I’d delete my Lemmy account, but that wouldn’t actually convince me it was a good idea for any reason other than because you gave me a stack of benjamins. I’d still remember the place fondly.
Before we had money, we had human relationships, and those are based on trust. You can’t replace trust with money; people try to do that all the time and it ends poorly.
In terms of its effect in the real world, what would the difference be between you doing that and you genuinely convincing you it was true? To me, the importance of money and the real world effect it had on your choice to do the above dwarfs anything else. I mean, I’d do it too obviously. We all know people don’t really love their jobs and they’re just lying but who cares? They all turn up to work and bust their arse just the same. Money was important enough for you to publicly deny your own mind.
I’m not saying you have to replace trust.
In the real world, trying to buy people’s trust without convincing them logically/morally to do so doesn’t always end well. If your boss yells at you at work every day, would you put up with the stress of dealing with that for the sake of money, even if it led you down the road to substance abuse and strained relationships with your friends/family? If you realized that you’d kill yourself within a month if you didn’t quit? I sure wouldn’t, unless I was dead certain that I wouldn’t get a better job anywhere else. The place that tries to compensate for a terrible work environment with tons of money will eventually find that they have no workers whatsoever. Last I heard, that’s actually happening to Amazon - they have such absurd turnover in their shipping plants that they’re running out of people to hire.
I threw out the Lemmy thing as an example of something I might do for the sake of money. It isn’t an ideological thing for me, this is just a place for me to pass time and have an occasional interesting conversation (like this one). Having internet discussions isn’t more important to me than having a stable income, it’s a thing of priorities. My religion, on the other hand, isn’t something I would give up for money.
I’m not asking to buy your trust though. Even then, I don’t have to trust you. I only have to trust the effect money will have on you.
Jessie what the fuck are you talking about
Oh, sorry, I WAS TALKING ABOUT MONEY.
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.
I’m proposing parents, or at least extended family members (which I should have mentioned), act as a family unit rather than letting the school do everything. Not only will this be a more efficient arrangement, because children are not metal sheets waiting to be stamped into the shape of an ideal person in a factory, but it will reinforce the failing bond within families today. This would lead to better educated, more intelligent, and happier young people.
Yes in a perfect world where everyone lives in a happy nuclear family that would be wonderful. That’s not the world we live in and we need schools to fill the gaps and provide support for the children that don’t have a home life that can support them. You can have both the school and parents teaching them but if you have neither it leads to shitty outcomes.
I know the nuclear family isn’t always possible. If it isn’t, then a few aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, etc. should be in the home as well. Schools have their utility, but by no means should they replace parents in all but the most dire of circumstances.
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.
I said “should,” not “will.” This post is more an indictment of idiots, abusers, and sloths who decide to become parents, than it is a jab at this particular genre of nonfiction. It’s more popular to say “school should have taught me this” than “my parents should have taught me this.”
Yeah like I’ll call out politicians, not about what schools teach and don’t, but what my parents teach and don’t?
Of course you’ll get less “my parents should have taught me this” than “school should’ve taught me this”. Your logic is quite biased.
Also if there are so many “sloths” etc that becomes parents, then it completely undermines your argument because schools should then teach what those parents aren’t.
How is it biased to call out people who don’t raise their children right? I probably should have mentioned the role that extended family can and should play in raising a child, but still. They can pick up the slack; we shouldn’t expect schools to have to do so. We as a society should stop accepting that families will just throw their kids in an institution, leave it at that, and hope for the best.
Schools should be very defined in what they teach people. Parents, or more broadly, families, know the kids best and how they learn. They should be able to give the kids a much more individualized education on the wisdom aspects of life. If we broaden the scope of schools to include pretty much everything children need to know, then we’d be better off shipping off our kids to boarding schools and washing our hands of the whole parenting problem.
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.
There, I put the discussion back on track.
Actually, I don’t want everyone to have parents like me. My parents divorced when I was too young to remember why and neither has explained why it happened. I want parents to actually teach their children how to live healthy lives. School has its place, but if you want school to teach children everything, then you might as well send them to boarding schools the minute they can string together coherent sentences.
Oooooohh, you’ve idealized a system that you’ve never experienced because you had shitty parents.
Yes, it would be nice if everyone’s parents were responsible and prepared, it would be nice if everyone had an extended family around them. I think everyone agrees with that.
The reality of the situation is PARENTS most often lack the training and resources to raise a kid. Parents lack the support of family, both parents are likely to be to work to afford their family.
The system you want doesn’t exist because nearly every member of our current system is engaged in capitalism, including the people taking care of the children for money, AKA daycares.
I see what you want, even if you don’t realize it, I wish I had good parents too, I hated school, but at least there were examples of good people there to show me how to live a non degenerate life, unlike my parents.
Oh, I know I want good parents. That much is painfully obvious. If my worst problem was that I was bored with my life, that would be great.
But again, where does it end? We need to draw the line somewhere and start holding people accountable for how they raise their kids. We need families to unite and provide for children however they can, even if that just means grandma watches them play when they’re home. Any little bit helps. We’re so atomized in America that maintaining a healthy family structure, much less raising children effectively, is difficult. The end result is that teachers are struggling to keep up and becoming burnt out. It would be better for everyone if people could just teach their children non-academic stuff instead of expecting someone else to do it for them.
The people who say “why doesn’t school teach this” are the people who wouldn’t learn it in school if they did. Also, some schools do teach it.
My school taught basic taxes/investments. One of my friends, who is horrible with money, always complains that we were never taught anything. I’m like we were, you just didn’t show up or didn’t care to listen.
Okay, but my parents were shit, so I learned nothing from anybody.
And if we, as a society, make it a habit to offload our morality and wisdom teaching onto the schooling system, we’re going to end up with no more parents at all; just breeders who ship off their kids. I’m sorry your parents were terrible, but that doesn’t mean we should force every school to pick up a curriculum for everything.
Which one would be easier to change? Every parent, or the educational system?
It would be easier to change the educational system, but our society has grown so gluttonous for shortcuts that I can’t recommend the easy way here.
Better question, do you want the least educated among us teaching what’s not currently in taught in school? Cause that’s what you’re advocating.
Now it’s obviously not all parents, but the point still stands. The better educated parents are already doing something to teach their kids what’s not in the curriculum, but even amongst them it’s still a small percentage.
Including things like basic taxation and financial education, the voting system, stuff like that. Make it mandatory to go through, if not actually have a passing grade.
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.
Where do you draw the line? Some people’s parents teach them reading, writing and mathematics before they even enter the school system. Does that mean the school system shouldn’t teach those three?
What if your parents don’t know how to fix a clogged sink? Or to cook food more complicated than pasta with ketchup?
What do you see as the purpose of the schooling system?
I applaud the parents that are helping their kids learn actual academic subjects to help them succeed in school. My point is that we have more and more people today whose parents are failing to prepare them for the wall world, and we would be better off if we concluded that “My parents/family should have taught this” rather than “School should teach this.” Then we could end the generational brain drain before it happens.
If your parents don’t know DIY or cooking, then that’s a failing on their part. Hopefully they can at least get some extended family members to lend a hand in that.
IMO, the purpose of a school is to teach you the academic knowledge you need to do well in college and have a base of intellectual knowledge. Your parents should be teaching you how to actually live out your life, because they should have those skills too. They should love you enough to pass them on, and have the time to do so. Otherwise, they’re either doing you a disservice or they’re being hampered by some external factor. I can appreciate that there are a lot of parents out there who can barely keep the lights on, but that doesn’t mean kids shouldn’t have some kind of family life. We used to have larger households with lots of people in them all pulling the weight in some way, and many people still live like this. If we could go back to something like that instead of expecting every single mother and father to live alone in a giant house with their kids, we would be better off.
In the end, what I want is for families to pick up the slack and teach their kids the skills they need so they don’t look back and say “I was failed.” They should instead look forward and say, “Now it is my turn to teach,” because they had a good family life.
What do you think schools should do?
But some parents simply are not in a position to teach their children. School is the solution for that, so if we all accept that new lessons need to be taught, school is the best place for it.
If your parents don’t know DIY or cooking, then you won’t learn it from them, so who do you learn it from when it comes time to teach the next generation? Also, whose fault is it? Theirs or their parents’?
Saying school is for college just kicks the can down the road. What’s the purpose of college? Should children not going to college be allowed to just skip school entirely?
If you believe that children should universally learn DIY, and you believe that the best way for that to happen is to learn it from their parents, and because of that oppose teaching it in school, then at the very least you’re just letting perfect be the enemy of good. We aren’t going back to the times before, so if the only solution you’ll accept is teaching at home, then simply put you’re functionally against children learning DIY.
What if they didn’t have a good family life? Is that it? Is your whole family line doomed to microwave meals?
I think schools should teach knowledge for the sake of knowledge, not because there’s some specific end goal in mind beyond having a general populace that is well versed in things.
The best question I can ask is, where does it end? Where do the responsibilities of the school (state or private) end and where do the responsibilities of the parent begin? If we start including everything under the sun for schooling, then eventually schools are going to completely take the role of parents in children’s lives. We need to draw the line somewhere, and we need to start holding families accountable for treating their kids poorly.
And renaming the books to “Things my parents should have taught me.”
I think some stuff is on the person themselves as well to be honest. The one I hear a lot is about “School should have taught us about taxes”. Except that school probably did teach you, it taught reading, maths, and general research (Google) skills.
The tax code changes all the time so it would be pointless to teach you about it 5-10 years before you’ll actually be doing it.
Plus the people I’ve heard this from in my own life, have been people that I know would not have paid attention to it in school anyway
Okay, I can kind of sort of get behind you on this but, there should be at least like a basic civics class that covers the general topics that you are likely to encounter as a functioning adult in society.
My mom let me do our taxes when I was 13.
She then reviewed what I had done, helping me along the way of course, and pointed out some things that I had missed.
When I was 14 I got to do them again, and she reviewed them and noted that I had done them very well. I have never had any issues doing my taxes as an adult and I’ve never paid a preparer to do my taxes for me.
This simple experiment has saved me several hundred dollars if not several thousand dollars over my life.
And it was literally easier for her because she had to do less work.
So I agree with the original poster that parents should be responsible for teaching their children all of the things that school will not teach them, and I also agree with you that it’s not that much to expect people to learn these things for themselves.
But, I also have to throw in the fact that I have always been an exceptional learner, and so I can’t compare my own experiences with that of the average because I don’t know how much my innate thirst for knowledge has biased me towards competence in this area above that of my peers.
My dad did the same thing with me. It was obviously very helpful, but it’s not like there isn’t an obvious prerequisite.
Not everyone’s parents are financially competent nor will they have the time to successfully coordinate an effort like that on top of everything else they might be required to do.
Additionally, what function do we expect of school? Is it to equalise, for young adults, those opportunities normally limited by education? Then it should teach those things which are important that not everyone’s parents are capable of teaching.
The other point is that school is the main temporal and logistical barrier to actually teaching your children as a parent. Between work and school and the other bureaucratic necessities of life, there isn’t always significant time a parent can spend with their child.
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Are you arguing we should have masturbation classes in school? If not, what is your point?
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What is your point?
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The point is to learn more. But since you asked, “nobody” is the answer to your initial question. Same person who should be teaching you how to smoke crack.
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This is kind of a 50/50 thing. Parents should be the ones teaching the children manners, morals and anything useful in life to survive it than school. School is the place that should be educating and challenging your learning ability while teaching you things parents can’t. Parents can’t come up with daily curriculums like a school can. But Schools can’t teach things a parent should either, other than just jam it down your throat about believing yourself and aim high .etc
Also, many of the things these people claim school didn’t teach them were actually taught in school. Maybe not directly, but in most cases schools do teach all the basic things one needs to do, for example, a tax return. They simply didn’t pay attention.
That too. The lessons are so boring that nothing is actually learned, time and money are wasted trying to teach something to people who do not want to learn.
The problem is that even those parents don’t know enough of that stuff to teach it to their kids. Either because they never learned it, or because the field has changed so much that their knowledge is outdated.
And what if one has shitty parents?
The point of this post is that if your parents didn’t teach you this stuff, among other life skills, they failed you. Not only that, but schools can’t always be expected to pick up the slack. Trying to revise schools to teach absolutely everything a parent should would just turn every school into a boarding school.
I think a better question is, for those who have shitty parents, should it be a school’s responsibility to fill in the gap, or should there be other social programs made available so that there isn’t an undue burden placed on teachers and school administrators?
I mean the reverse also applies. What if one has a shitty school?
Some people receive a better education being homeschooled than what their local school system could provide. Does that mean we should abandon the school system entirely?
The worst case school is still better at teaching you then the worst case parents. Parents who aren’t in a position to teach you anything are also a lot more common than the worst case 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
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.
Schools are a societies responsibility though. So I can try to create better schools for all while trying to create better parents… Oh wait I’ll taggle that with better social support systems and educations for future parents as well!
Good schools rock!
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.
There are some topics that are just boring and not relevant to kids, even if those topics are important for them later as adults.
And forcing them to sit through those topics at school when they’re so bored they will immediately memory hole the whole semester is a waste of everyone’s time. Your parents should be able to sit down with you and show you why what they’re teaching you matters, and know when to teach it.
