What isn’t being taught in schools

I just wrote a long answer on Quora about the deficiencies in schooling today. I think I’ve posted about this before, but it’s very important to me. Therefore I am cutting and pasting my response into this blog.

There are a lot of life skills that I feel should be added to the curriculum, but are not there.

Some of these have never been there. These include parenting — in particular how to approach different stages of development and a child. I feel many parents make critical mistakes which could be avoided with proper education. These would include shaking babies, which can easily kill them, and becoming enraged when very young children are not yet toilet trained, despite the fact that their development is within normal limits and they’re just too young.

Another thing that is often not taught is group ethics. We see many people getting swept into corruption or other illegal activities in offices and schools. I feel this is because they have not been adequately prepared with techniques for how to resist and recognize inappropriate pressure.

Also I feel physical education is too oriented around team sports. I feel there should be more emphasis on what individuals should be doing alone in their homes and neighborhoods to stay in shape for the rest of their lives. Realistically that doesn’t mean playing team sports. Also, people should not feel that they have to pay money to join a gym. There are many exercises that you can perform in your home or outside walking or jogging in your community. You shouldn’t have to join a gym. Yet people are not adequately trained so that they know what to do without joining a gym.

Another thing is basic personal finances. We spend a lot of time teaching young people math skills such as addition and subtraction, algebra and geometry. However in reality what they need to be able to do is plan a budget. They need to know how much they can afford for certain things and how they can most effectively use their money and save for the future. I so often hear stories about people running up huge debt on credit cards. They don’t seem to realize how the interest expenses are going to overwhelm their finances in the future. They should be learning about that in courses at school. They should be learning how to plan for reasonable expenditures, rather than impulse expenditures.

There are also topics that used to be taught in school, which have been removed these include home economics and shop. We all used to have to take those things. Those things are absolutely critical. There has been an extreme over emphasis on college preparatory courses recently in the United States. We are raising a generation of children who are helpless, who don’t know how to do anything to take care of themselves. We need to go back to more vocational courses as well, including: electronics, auto mechanics, carpentry, even handyman stuff…

The over emphasis on college prep is misplaced. We have a glut of college educated people in the United States. We have a shortage of skilled trades people. Moreover college prep courses really don’t teach you use for life skills. They’re just abstract knowledge. People need to know creative problem-solving much more than they need to know these various academic details.

In that regard, the elimination of art and music programs is appalling. Scientific research has shown that art and music programs improve neurological development, creativity, and intelligence. By eliminating these courses, we are destroying children’s brains. These are not optional courses. They are absolutely mandatory to maintain the intelligence and creativity of the population.

Testing that emphasizes academic achievement as a measure of the quality of students is completely misplaced. In the past, Americans have always been the best problem solvers and the most successful economically in the world. Crazy people have compared our children’s academic achievement to those of students in other countries, without seeing that this academic achievement is irrelevant in general to the population and to our economic and academic success.

my father was a professor of physics in as research oriented department. He also was on the graduate admissions committee for his university. He found that student who had been raised on farms in the United States were the most successful physicists. This was because as children they had learned to do things, useful things. They knew how to build things. They knew how to design new machines and repair old ones.

Moreover, obviously children who are raised on farms had lots of opportunities to play, unsupervised outdoors. Looking at nature also improves neurological development. Playing unsupervised outdoors allows for a great creativity.

Also, children who grow up on farms are physically stronger than other children. If you take a city then and put them out in a farm and ask them to do farm work, they won’t be able to do it. They won’t be strong enough or have enough endurance.

Basically, we are raising children to be helpless droids. All they know how to do is sit passively and watch screens. They may have great factual knowledge. They don’t know how to do anything practical in the world. And, physically, they are very weak.

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Addendum: 1/10/20

I saw a question on Quora about teaching kids dating skills. This is another good idea, IMHO.  There are a lot of dating disasters going on -- including date rape.  Maybe some training would help people.