My moms high school suggestion

[Missile]

Today I was talking to my mom about school in the car today, and she said that many high school classes, like the English and some of the math classes, should be replaced with classes that teach life skills. Like how to buy a house or how to take out a loan, or classes on stuff like the stock market, stuff like that.
And she said that the dropped classes should be optional or should be in college.

What do you guys think about my mom's suggestion?

[brainiac3397]

I might have to argue English to stay, and maybe reform to be better. Lots of people suck at English...

However a class that teaches the basics of finance etc. would certainly be quite helpful.

BTW there are already enough high-school level classes provided in college because high schools do a bad job of teaching em properly. Do you really want to add another year to college with more of these classes?

[SoulRiser]

Learning the English language is fine and useful, but a lot of the stuff they shove into that subject (like analyzing poems) is nowhere near as useful as the stuff Missile's mom mentioned.

And really, I know people who took English as a subject and are still terrible at it. So it really doesn't help that much anyway.

[HawkbitAlpha]

(03-05-2015 05:20 AM)SoulRiser Wrote:  Learning the English language is fine and useful, but a lot of the stuff they shove into that subject (like analyzing poems) is nowhere near as useful as the stuff Missile's mom mentioned.

Ever seen a curriculum that asks you what meter a poem is in?

[SoulRiser]

I dunno. I haven't seen any more curriculums than the one I was subjected to, and I can't for the life of me remember what a "meter" of a poem even is.

[Missile]

One of my mom's complaints about high school is that it barely teaches you how to function in the world and it's just about memorizing crap just to get a good test grade.

[brainiac3397]

Supposedly most English curriculums, in America at least, poems are designed by Poetic Engineers. Otherwise why would we have to learn about the meter, tempo, rhythm and whatever other crap they try to teach us about writing poems, without ever really making you practice writing poems?

I was listening to TED radio hour and they were talking about success. Some lady did research and found that a successful student had "grit" which was defined as perseverance and the belief that failure was only a temporary situation. It didn't matter what you memorized, what your natural ability was etc. Then they discussed the meaning of success(which is not the typical wage-slave obedient student shit).

My favorite was one guy explaining that in medieval times, someone who was at bottom of society was an "unfortunate" but in modern-day America we call them "losers", thus saying that these people got what they deserved. The obsession on success being a race or competition has led to a situation where the winner deserved what they got, but the loser deserved to lose even if things that were not in control of that person contributed through it.

Thus we have an unhealthy opinion of what success means. From now on I shall never call anybody a "loser" but simply "unfortunate".

[James Comey]

The problem with your mom's suggestion is that it's essentially the same problem anyway... the whole factory model system of doing things; basically, categorizing and such. It's not really going to be better.

[xcriteria]

Has seen boyinaband's video? Or have you? Similar themes.



Watch on YouTube

By the way, he's doing a YouTube livestream tomorrow afternoon US time about how school curriculum should be updated.



As for the question, I think that rather than just swapping out some required classes for some other ones, education needs to adapt to help people learn how to learn, and pursue interests. That includes life-relevant learning, like about spending money, making agreements, and so on.

But that need not be "instead of English." It should be instead of forcing people to waste their time in classes where they aren't learning (which might include their English class.)