Every topic added means another must be cut.
What gets cut? P.E? Foreign language? History? Math? Electives? English?
What gets cut? P.E? Foreign language? History? Math? Electives? English?
Most of it amounts to moving around for 30 min and you get graded on wether you brought a change of clothes.
Thats not to say PE couldn't be useful. Physical fitness was never my strong suit in highschool and PE did nothing to change that.
After making a good salary in a startup, I worked with a personal trainer and learned about muscle hypertrophy, starting strength and general strategies for conditioning along with diet with particular goals. Maybe if we taught that stuff in PE, it would be worth keeping around.
I would rather we fix foreign language education rather than just cut it. Besides, why not teach parts of these "life lessons" during foreign language class? Might be interesting to compare home economics in different cultures.
That's why it should be opt-in. The people that are capable of getting value from it (you) join in and the people guaranteed to get no value due to a lack of interest (me) can do something else.
The same thing shouldn't apply to critical/foundational classes like basic math. But foreign languages aren't that.
Btw, one of my English teachers, taught us also in Chemistry and did that in English for a year. That was 25 years ago.
That being said, they fact that reading math scores are so low in many places my pre-supposed “advanced” topics life financial literacy.
I would require basic law, accounting, and economics classes.
35 years later, the ability to write English has probably had at least the same amount of positive influence over my career as my ability to write C++ or Javascript. I should probably apologize to my high school English teachers.
I'm torn on foreign language. I think everyone should be bilingual, at least. But how it's taught in US schools is mostly useless. I took Spanish every year from 7th grade through 12th, but my Spanish even just a few years later was conversationally useless. I think kids should be learning a second language pretty much immediately when they start going to school, and there should be an effort to ensure it gets used outside that language class. (Easy if they only teach a single second language, but harder if students/parents get a choice.)
We did have a home economics class at some point in either middle or high school. I don't remember it very well, but I think that could have been a good place to teach some basic financial literacy. What I do remember was a bunch of sewing projects, and while I do think sewing is an essential life skill (I still on occasion hand-sew things), I don't think learning how to sew a stuffed animal is more important than learning how debt works.