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 agree. Based on the comments I’ve read I think readers are interpreting it wrong maybe because Lemmy users tend to be young and many are students themselves, they see this as directed at them. Your post I assume is directed at the parents and people who someday intend to be parents. I’d also like to add that it’s the parents job to teach their children discipline and to discipline their children. Public schools should teach about all religions, parents should be the ones to raise their children under their choice of religion. Parents should teach their children manners and mutual respect before sending them to school
Lemmy users tend to be young?
This place is full of grognards, compared to any other social media I’ve ever interacted with. Could still skew young in absolute terms, I suppose, but boy there’s a lot of oldheads in here.
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.
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
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.
Just admit you were wrong dude. It’s ok.
I agree, under ideal conditions, parents should have the time and ability to teach their kids many things. At the same time, I believe in the “… sins of the father …”, and “… it takes a village …” aphorisms.
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 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.
i for one don’t think we should rely on parents to make sure children live good lives, as controversial an opinion as that may be…
the idea of expecting at most 2 people to be wholly responsible for a child’s upbringing is absolutely crazy, i don’t understand how it has become standard practice. For most of humanity’s history children were a communal responsibility, we need to bring back neighbourhood grandmas.
‘It takes a village to raise a child’. Still true now as it ever was…we just seem to have lost our villages.
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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Boy, if only we had access to a globe-spanning network of computers that could give us access to information on how to perform basic repairs and small construction projects. If we had that we’d be able to teach ourselves the skills necessary to save hundreds or even thousands of dollars a year by not calling a professional to do simple work.
Too bad such an information network is just a fantasy and everyone is completely helpless. We had better resign ourselves to not even try to solve our own problems.
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I didn’t say “do everything” now did I?
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Ok, but because you can’t afford to do that, you cannot specialize completely.
Learning how to do simple stuff is worthwhile just so you don’t have to deal with the risk of having an incompetent/careless person working on your stuff. The amount of time I’ve wasted going back and fixing shitty workmanship from people my parents hired to work on their (practically brand new) house is ridiculous and I’m not even a professional. After dealing with all that shit I don’t trust tradespeople at all. I’m sure there’s good ones but if you’re just pulling names out of the phone book there’s a decent chance you’ll get fucked in my experience.
Isn’t that quite a bit degenerative? I think everyone should have at least some basic skills.
It is degenerative, which is the point of the argument.
We fostered a society where both parents work, often far away from where they live. The time normally and naturally allotted to educating your own children has been steadily shrinking to make room for an education that normally lasts until adulthood. The expectation now being that your children will not pick up the family trade.
For some people, this trade off has been degenerative in some aspects, and that’s why they complain ‘school never taught me x’.
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Just gonna add this to the pile.
Most kids spend more time at school than at home, and during their prime functioning hours, and their teachers prime functioning hours. Kids come home to parents that are often burned out by their job. We still do our best for our kids, but the vast majority of us aren’t professionally trained teachers, either.
I’m not saying schools should be in charge of everything a kid learns, but if there’s a baseline expectation of knowledge that we expect from every adult in our society, then yeah, we probably do want our children to learn those things in school so we can at least try to ensure every kid gets a chance to learn them.
My kids definitely spend more waking hours at school. If they’re doing extracurricular activities it isn’t unusual for them to be gone from 7a to 9p. The earliest they get home is 6p. Oh and then they still have homework.
Fair point, but those activities are optional and they still need support from the parents to carry on. When I got out of high school in the US about a decade ago, we were getting let out of school at 2-3PM. The latest I ever stayed was probably 5PM for a club. Even so, you’re providing food and shelter for them, you raised them from birth to when they could start going to school, and you probably want to be there for them in some way after they graduate from school, while they’re in college, and beyond. Schools are too limited in scope to do all that.
Yeahy my oldest is 19 and she did a semester in the college dorms but she’s back home now. And actually she’ll listen to us now. When she was 17 she didn’t hear anything we said. We tried to teach her some of these things but she knew it already. Until she realized she didn’t. She’s knocking out some debt really quickly now, she’s doing really well.
That’s good to hear. Teens can be tough, but I’m glad you’re there for them.
I’m glad my parents didn’t teach me how to cook because if they had, my cooking would fucking suck.
I will mourn the precious raw materials wasted to make your parents’ abominable food. In a better world, you and them would have made some killer stuff together.
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.
I sort of agree in that parents should teach in addition to schools. However, this feels like entitlement showing because it makes a bunch of assumptions about parents (that others have already commented on), but just even having parents. There are a lot of people who only have one parent, or no parents for various reasons. What about kids who lost one of their parents to cancer and their remaining parent doesn’t have the capacity to teach the subjects you mentioned? Schools provide an opportunity for common education for everyone.
If one parent dies, that’s tragic. The surviving parent should seek support from friends and family to raise the child. If both parents die, that’s even worse, and the kids should be placed either with their remaining family or with one willing to adopt them. That’s an entirely separate apparatus.
