Emotional regulation and understanding. Most people never learn this either at schools or elsewhere.
This. Mindfulness and meta-learning are the number one skill.
Came here for this
I just read a book called Lost in School by Ross Greene that proposes teaching emotional and behavioral skills like regulating your emotions in school. The idea is that it will lead indirect positive effects on things like scholastic results, aside from the direct benefits. It’s without a doubt the best course literature I’ve read.
That being agreeable is one of the greatest cheats in life. No matter how much you know on something, or how smart you are, if your personality sucks you won’t get very far.
So many talented and skilled people I know failed because they just would not work with other people very well. It’s extremely rare to be an individual talent skilled enough to overcome that barrier, so at least work on yourself a little bit so you don’t die from pride.
This one goes way farther than people realize. My father built a great career as an engineer with a large network of people who would hire him in an instant. He’s just nice, polite, and helps the people around him.
I’m very similar to him and it’s worked very well for me too. I might be stupid as fuck sometimes, but I own it and I’m nice. I’m somewhat early in my career but I can already see what my behavior gets me.
Oh yeah being a friendly and helpful engineer sets you apart lol. It’s done great things for me
The importance of savings and investments, especially when you’re young.
And also that it’s okay not to like someone, but really fucking not okay to make you not liking someone the other person’s problem.
One more vote financial literacy.
Credit wcore, how loans and credit cards work.
And knowing gambling only works for the House.In math class when learning statistics we learned “the law of large numbers” , how with enough samples the average approaches the probability. Then applied it to two real world examples, gambling (lottery and roulette) and insurance. The math was the same, and the house always wins because the house deals in large numbers.
The takeaway is that gambling is stupid because the house always wins.
But also, statistics do not apply to individuals, so insurance is not stupid. At least not for life-altering expenses, like home, medical and traffic.
Just for a simple tiblit: House always wins in roulette because if you bet every number your win will be 1-2-3 tokens short. Depends on 0/00/000 tables.
There is no hidden cheat in it.
The only fair bet in a casino is the odds on the craps. But you have to be already in with a disadvantageous bet: Come/Dont come.
Do not pay for drugs in advance.
Have to get the dealer to answer their phone first.
So many daily small thzate kinda impossible to teach a whole class, but are easy to teach a single child (source: I work in a school):
- reading the clock. May sound weird, but some kids get it really early and quickly, some take more time. Thus pretty frustrating to teach the whole class
- tying shoes (I know too many kids with 8 or 9 years old who can’t tie a knot, shoes are a good starter)
- generally small motor skills (crafts, crochet, weaving, whatever you want…)
And the one thing that school cannot teach and is also very difficult for parents: questioning authority
questioning authority
Parent: make sure to question authority
Kid: why?
Parent: listen here you little shit…
Small motor skills - you know what’s SUPER good at teaching this? Writing in cursive, it’s why it needs to stay in schools.
All the things listed are also easily teachable to groups - group exercises/worksheets and practice for clocks, tying shoes used to be considered standard to be taught at preschool/kindergarten it’s a matter of practice and cursive
What’s your experience with groups of children? You can show stuff. But repetition and practice are not a great thing in a school setting. That needs to happen outside of school. I’ve worked with far over thousand kids and worked in elementary schools for over 10 years now. Yes you can “teach” the things. But the kids need time and space for their own pace at repeating and practicing them
My mom was an early education teacher for over 30 years and this is all stuff she taught, she didn’t do cursive because that starts in second grade but letters, numbers, clocks, tying shoes/learning buttons, reading, zippers etc etc etc are all early educational norms. Granted I wasn’t the teacher but I was involved in it and helped her do her yearly syllabus and helped with in class projects etc.
It needs to happen inside and outside school. The issue is we don’t give teachers any authority and we don’t give parents any time to parent their kids.
And the one thing that school cannot teach and is also very difficult for parents: questioning authority
I’d widen it to: questioning ideals and argumentation
Cooking, each generation is losing the skill.
I got taught that in school as well as all the basic nutritin stuff
Wouldn’t it be better to have affordable delivery food? Cooks focus on the cooking, regular people won’t have to spend so much time learning and doing cooking, and focus on their own work/play
A human is not an ant! We don’t have to specialize THAT hard! A person should be able to read, cook, clean, do laundry, hammer a nail, screw a screw, paint a picture, and write a poem, at the very least.
that list feels a bit outdated. What about write a simple program? Make basic 3d models and 3d prints? Some photography and video editing. Design a simple website. Even if you aren’t a tiktoker, these are fairly essential skills in the modern world. And if we’re throwing in poetry and painting, might as well throw in music, sports, sewing, gardening.
I’m not saying humans should specialize on a single skill. I just think people should be able to choose not to cook in favor of learning other skills. At a certain point, society should reach a point where somebody can say “I don’t need a kitchen in my house, I’ll just eat out all the time”.
The problem with your argument is that humans need to eat somewhere between 2 and 5 times a day. Nothing else on your list comes anywhere close to that level of frequency or importance. Just because you learn how to cook doesn’t mean you have to cook every meal either. You should still just know how to do it.
That being said, there is an economic line where this matters. If you make $100 an hour, and have the opportunity to work overtime, cooking is a waste of your time unless you’re batch cooking or just doing it for enjoyment. However, If you’re making $12 an hour, the time cooking likely saves you more money than you would make working and then using that to pay for meals out. The actual tipping point will change depending on your wage and the cost of food.
I’m a bit of a wierdo in this, I have not once in my almost 40 years of life ever ordered food delivered to me. I’ve gone out to eat, I’ve picked up takeout myself, but I have never had food delivered to my home. I make enough for that to make sense, but I just don’t.
But we also need to go to the toilet a few times a day. Doesn’t mean everybody should do some plumbling. Why can’t food be treated like a utility, like electricity and water?
The answer to that is yes… Everyone should be able to do a little bit of plumbing.
However you don’t need to a plumber every time you use the toilet so that’s a bad example.
The concern is scale, Someone cooks your food every time you eat. One person can only cook for a limited number of humans. It only takes a dozen people to actively provide water to every house in a city.
OK well if the concern is scale then I do think that is solvable. There is work being done to automate cooking more and more
In my case social skills. I was the typical nerd. About 10 years after I finished school I figured out I could learn to get along better with people just like I learnt how to do complicated maths.
Compound Interest.
You didn’t learn compound interest in school?
I did.
(i actually took AP Stats and learned a good deal more than that)
But many, many do not.
And it is of vital importance that that anyone in this … final stage capitalist / technofeudal dystopia understand it well.
The US education system at least has fallen off a goddamned cliff, average kid is now 3 years behind grade level in literacy, I think its similar with numeracy.
Shits gettin’ real bad, really fast… if you have kids, you need to make sure they understand compound interest.
Critical thinking skills - they’re actually very difficult to teach and constantly incorporating them into everyday life is super important
The easiest but most tricky way is through paranoia. It’s easier to look at the bigger picture of whatever you’re presented with if you always doubt the intentions of the one doing the presenting. Of course that could backfire by then doubting subject matter experts like doctors and physicists and end up becoming antivaxxers or flat earthers.
This is why teaching formal logic and basic philosophy should be right up there with critical thinking skills in general
I teach all of my kids that “no” is a complete sentence. I want them to be very conscious of consent, but I also want them all to respect their own wishes.
Unrelated, I also teach them all how to throw a good punch and keep their god damned hands up and chin down as soon as I think they have enough self control not to abuse it.
‘No’ is grounds for suspension at Bede Polding College, Australia.
Obligatory fuck Catholic schools, and the fascist teachers running them.
Schools are obsessed with academics because they tend to be more easily measurable. Therefore, they are spending less time building character, morals, and thinking skills. Teaching them how to be a good person is more important than ever.
How to be kind.
Cooking, efficient cleaning, basic repairs
Heck I still barely have skills in these sets. My cooking is really basic, my cleaning is likely not every efficient and what is took me years to get, and I muddle through repairs.
How life works in general, things that you’re required to do or expected to understand as an adult. For example, different types of bank accounts, credit card fees, how credit scores work and what they’re used for, how government and elections work and how these impact people’s actual lives (beyond just submitting your vote and naming the branches of government), how to read a food label and why they should (this might get a small section in health class), how health insurance works, etc.
Basically just how our society is structured and what that means for the individual.
This.
and for elementary school
