They should also revive or create classes that teach other important, basic, life skills - budgeting, banking, getting a loan, investing, hiring a contractor, buying appliances, tiling, roofing, drywalling, etc, etc.
1. Basic cookery. Including how to use the stove top, induction range, microwave, air fryer, stand mixer, and oven. How to choose a refrigerator, dishwasher, and other big ticket appliances.
2. Basic economics and finance. What is taken out of your paycheck e.g., state and federal taxes, social security and Medicare taxes, health insurance premiums, and contributions to 401k etc. How do credit cards work, how do car loans work, and how do mortgages work. Understand the different interest rates they charge. How do medical, auto, and home insurance work. How to file a tax return.
3. Elementary engineering. Basic concepts of how things work and how not to get injured. How electric circuits work (avoid touching the hot wire to something other than the terminal). How the house electrical circuits work. What is the purpose of the breaker panel and the GFCI mini breaker. How fires start and how to put out an oil fire vs regular fire. How to start a wood fire including feather sticks, fire steel, and steel wool & a nine volt battery. How house plumbing work including where does the pee and poo go. How the HVAC, furnace, and mini split work.
4. Basic technology. How to stay safe online. What to do if your credit card or identity is stolen. Password managers, MFA, and passkeys. How to shop for a mobile phone and understand all the fees the carrier will charge. How to use a LLM and ChatGPT.
Abstractly, people's eyes glaze over on a spreadsheet.
Hands-on exposes kids to the vast inequalities out there, and that sounds terrifying without the right societal contextualization. What if the doctor's kid analyzes daddy's W2 and the other kid can only analyze their parent's 1099 uber returns. Or, a kid grasping the mathematics of compound interest doesn't necessarily mean that mean they can understand why their friends' parents have a 16% auto loan while theirs is only 4%.
Not saying we should protect The Children from the messy realities of the world -- our current approach of "they'll figure taxes out on their own" is about as effective as the "don't even mention sex" philosophy used until the mid 1900's -- I'm just saying to really understand these financial concepts requires guiding kids through a whole lot more ugliness of the world, and I'm not sure many schools know how to do that kind of integrated life learning. Hell, even most adults don't know how to think about such things.
I dunno... maybe the easiest thing here is to just go live in income-segregated neighborhoods so we never need to ask such difficult questions with our neighbor-friends.
I guess what I am saying is there is always a textbook/spreadsheet component of consumer finance. How else can you explain the effects of interest compounding on your credit card if you never pay off the balance? But you can also try to role place scenarios to show why you want to know this stuff. e.g., if you are low income but working there is a good chance that when you file your tax return you will get cash back due to the earned income tax credit.
> It was basically "home ec" is for girls, shop is for guys.
We didn't have too many girls in the shop classes, but we had a surprisingly large numbers of guys taking the clothing and textiles classes. It was regarded as one of the most relaxed and enjoyable electives, and there was an unofficial exemption to the uniform policy that you could wear things you'd produced in class, so it was nice to see the schoolyard brightened by students wearing strange and colorful clothing.
As for trade skills, sure, no issue with that.
(I was one of those kids going "why the hell are we learning this" until I got to grad school and was able to put it together).
The retention rate for these classes are abysmal, which is why you have people propose they should be taught, despite they themselves actually sitting through these classes, simply because any memory of these classes have been erased from their memory.
Of course, I then went into software and haven’t used calculus since.
Save the other stuff for college. If you want to incentivize the population to take those classes, give credits or discounts on tuition or find some other mechanism.
I always dislike trying to stuff more classes in high school because you're still kids.
If you don't have all of your lifeskills in order by the time you're 18, what are you even doing.
What %age of Americans attending high school will take out loans in their lifetime?
Financial sense shouldn't be knowledge of the privileged class, we ~all have to deal with money/debt.
A professor saying "And I'm great at doing the right thing" would be as out of place as them bragging about their fitness or wealth.
"here are various ways that people have tried to determine the right thing to do throughout time" would have been vastly preferable to "heres how private schools with private funding successfully managed to extort the government for even more funding"
Maybe you can consider the teacher to be good because I remember the (many, many) lessons on the topic.
Although if you were going to have something more concrete, like Engineering Ethics except somehow for high schoolers without a particular career chosen, a few weeks of philosophy would probably be good background.
It's the financial equivalent of not teaching what temperature water freezes at.
In my small country we have a website where random people can post suggestions for the government, and if it gets enough votes, some PR representative has to look at the suggestion and write a answer.... every few weeks there is a suggestion about how schools should teach kids stuff that their parents should teach them at home... even cooking, cleaning, etc. Have the parents really "failed in life" so much, that they can't even teach the kids to cook and clean and wash, etc.?
Shop class... somewhat understandable, power tools are not realy a thing parents living in apartments in large cities have, so yes, that's beneficial to kids... but other stuff?
Do you have any idea how much it costs to get a roofer out to fix your roof? In my area if the job is less than $50k you can't find anyone who is interested. Not doing it yourself is an incredibly expensive luxury. Best know how to do it properly and safely.
I think the goal is to help boost the kids whose parents don't know some of the basics, like budgeting, balancing a checkbook, buying an appliance, typing, etc... The people who aren't doing well in modern society lack these skills, and teaching their kids is an opportunity to boost them out of potential poverty.
This is not the way. If some kids have lacking home life, intervene directly for those students. Don't take away responsibility from parents.
The reality is, in places this matters, parents already are failing to teach their kids, and where there are successful families, parents continue to teach their kids.
I do wonder though if some personal finance, consumer research, etc. skills won’t be taught as readily thanks to the smartphone, though. Having paper forms or a checkbook out makes it easier to start a conversation
There's no reason to make a list of school topics and keep it separate from parent topics (except perhaps in particularly sensitive cases, but that's now what's being discussed here).
Things like reading a Daily Mail article and identifying all the nonsense parts.
I don't know it out helps society. I suspect people don't think like this once the class is over.
You will find no shortage of teachers confused about their own pensions.
also you need to keep budget in mind and the teacher shortage
Baking cookies and learning to sew was at least a nice break from studying books.
I went to a public US high school with a nursing magnet program and an automotive program.
Both saw you with a phlebotomist license or a technician certification respectively.
These were wildly popular programs despite having academic requirements (for the nursing track)
I think high schoolers care about practicality, actually.
> also you need to keep budget in mind and the teacher shortage
crazy thought, though.
Maybe pay teachers more? Make it a more attractive career? Vote in superintendents with more education experience than corporate.
Idk… anything but throw your hands up and say “well nobody wants to teach so idk”
I'm sure there are some corporate superintendents, but I've never seen one. It is almost always a teacher's union endorsed ex-teacher who was recently a principal in the district, or a superintendent from another district in the state.
Live near a big school district (major metropolitan area), then you will see the corporate and career political types in the CEO office.
I think things would be much better if they had been teachers, but the teachers are all either burnt out or still teaching.
Best advice is to go with a slower set time so you can go at the pace you feel comfortable.
Now good and fast that's the hard part.