Real world skills in school
Posted on June 10th, 2007 in education, rants |
It’s ironic how little school actually prepares it’s students for real life and the real world. I know it’s said time and time again, but it’s so painfully true. School seems to be simply about slotting kids into jobs. Unfortunately, a large majority leave school and wander about for years before deciding what they actually might possibly want to do. Of course, that decision doesn’t hold as much weight as it used to, considering it’s estimated my generation will go through numerous jobs in our lifetime.
This is why fostering the development of skills should be the top-most priority in any form of education reform. Leo over at zen habits has come up with a list of 27 such useful life skills that aren’t currently in the curriculum. The only ones I somewhat disagree with are auto care (a very American thing) and household care - they are both rather difficult to oversee in a school setting.
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6 Responses
Most of those skills I learned from my parents. I’m not sure our education system should be teaching those skills. First, kids are already in school for 8 hours a day. When would you find time to add extra elements to the curriculum? Second, many of these 27 life skills are easier for parents to teach, while material taught in school is easier for teachers.
My parents were easily able to teach me about compassion, budgeting, cooking, and home care. But biology, history, physics, and calculus might have been a bit over their heads.
I think we generally agree here Chris. I do support parents teaching many of these skills because, yes, they do generally fall under the parent domain. I was lucky to have learnt things like budgeting at a young age. However, for those of us who don’t, there should be a venue to get this information, before they go broke at 30. Personal finance is one of the most recommended additions to the school curriculum down in the States.
Skills like critical thinking are a bit more difficult to wedge into schools, as they aren’t necessarily testable. Judging and improving critical thinking requires projects instead of worksheets, and smaller class sizes.
As for growing the curriculum - at first glance, adding these types of things would make it even more overwhelming for teachers, of course. I failed to mention this in the blog post, as I haven’t quite done a diatribe on my full opinions concerning education. In any case, I would remove a lot of these so called required classes, and replace them with more skills based learning.
I totally agree with you. Honestly, unless you’re going into a special field of work, basic math and other course basics are all you really need.
I really like current events topics in school, as they really interest me. Grade 6 was a great year, we’d have weekly debates on lots of stuff, the biggest topic was the War on Iraq (on/in?). Current events and social studies/history are very important to know, in my opinion.
Anyways, life skills have been of great use to me, and job skills are definitely up there as well. They can teach you all you want, but until you go out there and do it, the stuff they teach you in school is essentially worthless.
Great comment Michael. I completely agree with your view. We should talk ;)
Socials, not only history, but current events, and people, are some of the most important and interesting subjects one can learn. The concept and many of the teachings of science are essential to modern life, but so much of the classes are detail and filler. As for math, most people don’t need anything past simple algebra, and even that would be debatable. Language and fine arts don’t necessarily need to be separate subjects and could easily be rolled into daily coursework and projects.
I’m surprised you were talking about the War in Iraq back in Grade 6! Your teacher must have good predictions skills. He should go try the lottery! :P
Either Michael is really young, or he is referring to the first Gulf War. I was in Grade 8 for the that, and it wasn’t discussed that much in school (wasn’t nearly as controversial), but I remember hearing about it a lot in the news.
http://www.australianpolitics.com/news/2003/03/03-03-19.shtml
March 19, 03 was when the war started, I’m in grade 10. Take off 4 years, that’s grade 6.