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 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.”