Throughout the years, this thought has occurred to me over and over again. Public education is supposed to prepare children/teens for life, right? But in this day and age, are we missing some fundamental lessons? I took finance and economics in my senior year of high school, but it was an elective. I couldn't believe how helpful and necessary that course was, and can not for the life of me understand why it's an elective and not mandatory. Wouldn't it benefit everyone to know how to write a check? Balance their bank account? Understand the finances of living?

And every time I research living wills, wills, life insurance, disability insurance, retirement... my mind spins from all the information out there. This is complicated stuff, but important for all of us to be able to balance. Math, History, Science, Reading, Writing, etc. are, I think, important to learn in school. But the basics of living are just as important, if not more. Why is it that courses like these aren't offered or considered mandatory? I personally think they would make for a better world/nation for all of us if they were.

I agree and actually had a friend who said it should be a course that teaches kids how to do stuff like that because they're going out in the real world without a single clue on how to do any of it.


I had a thought a while back, a wildly unpopular one, that since schools take it upon themseleves to teach kids about sex and pregnancy and diseases and protection, and how to cook, and how to drive, because apparently you can't trust their parents to teach them correctly...why don't they have a course that teaches them the proper way to use firearms? Think about it, it's sooooo vital that school teaches you how to use a condom but it's of no importance if you have the first idea about gun safety or not? That doesn't make much sense to me.

What's missing in public education? Integrity.

I don't know how the public education system is where you live, but that was a MANDATORY course for me in high school. I needed economics to graduate. Everyone learned how to balance a checkbook, how to prepare a budget, how to read the stock market, etc. We bought and sold stocks in my class. And I learned that shit in the 8th, 9th, and 10th grade. IMO, the course needed to go into greater details about financial matters instead of giving the basics, but I guess it was just enough to wet the appetite for someone who would be more interested in the field. Econ was my favorite subject in school and I was an econ major in college. IMO, what's missing in the public education system are dedicated teachers and administrators. We have all the information needed to teach, it's just not getting out the way it's supposed to.

I agree they'd be really helpful. They do have accounting 11 and 12 on top of the business ed stuff in grade 10. All are electives though. I had done the business ed and I'm glad I did at that age. I guess it needs to be encouraged more. But I agree,it would prepare them way better in life than some other things.

This thread completely reminds me of something during my sr. year. Second semester, I had to fill an hour. There was nothing except advanced chem., and I really did not want to take that the second semester. So, I begged, Mr. H, the teacher of a basic sr. math type class (can't remember what it was called). It was for kids who could not get past Algebra, and I had already taken A2, and Geometry. Anyway, he finally agreed and it was the types of things like balancing a check book, budgeting, shopping for insurance, obtaining loans...that sort of thing. It was very valuable and I was so surprised that it was something only ever offered to poor math students.

What's missing is a sane, humanist premise for life. School doesn't prepare people for life, it prepares them to take a job in an economy. School trains wage slaves to operate in corporations, and the social institutions that organize the lives of wage slaves in their off hours. What is called education is indoctrination, instruction and training. Thinking is a liability in school. Obedience, and mastery of specialized skills, and adoption of cultural habits is required.

For some odd reason, people want to protect children from being overworked too young. Elementary schools were begun and remain as an alternative to the factory work done by adults.

Adults are to have jobs, live in debt, raise replacement workers and die in the poverty that awaits the useless. To that end nothing is missing in the public education curriculum. It's not unless you suppose some other goal for education that anything is missing. When you want education to be about progressive thinking, truth, discovery, invention and you prefer a humane philosophy to a wage slave economy, then public education is something to escape and avoid.

What is the overall goal of having public education in the first place? Answer that and then anything missing becomes obvious, or else nothing is missing and there are some extraneous ideals floating around.

I thought the overall goal of public education was to prepare youths for adulthood. Teaching them how to think critically; Exposing them to a wide range of activities/interests/schools of though; Sharpening their greatest skills and teaching them how to use them in the best way... I'm sure there are more reasons than that, but if school is to prepare them for their future, and finances are one of the biggest responsibilities of an adult, then it seems like a huge disservice NOT to teach them the basics of that. Financial advisors say that preparing for retirement (saving/investing money) is something that should start as soon as possible, but it's not something that's easy to navigate on your own. The basics of balancing your checkbook and planning for retirement (as well as balancing living expenses, or financially planning for a family) are things that everyone should know how to do. And if everyone did know how to do these things, would we be in the economic crisis we're in now? I took several art classes in high school. But what good is learning a skill, perfecting it, getting a job.. if you don't know what to do with your money?

CatEyes10736 wrote:

I thought the overall goal of public education was to prepare youths for adulthood. Teaching them how to think critically; Exposing them to a wide range of activities/interests/schools of though;

To hear a lot of people talk, school is just where you go to shut up and do what you're told. A lot of people I've talked to, they got in trouble in school just for asking questions, others were punished because they read faster than the rest of the class. And to that, I have to ask, what kind of an education is that?

Don't think that high school diploma is ever going to be the be all and end all to your degree......

The purpose of public school originally was to train children to become workers in an industrial society. The school was the factory that produced factory workers. Public policy was to assort children into categories matching the jobs waiting for them as workers. The grades given determined which students would go on to colleges for further training to be executives, managers and professionals, leaders, clergy, and so on. The top of society is the wealthy class. Below them is a professional and managerial class, and the vast bottom is the working class. Education was never intended to promote each student reaching their potential except within the narrows scope of those jobs to which they were being sent after graduation.

Like competition does, there is a prize held out to motivate contestants. Try your best and we'll reward the best with the best jobs. The rest, good luck and thanks for playing. It was understood in crafting education policy that esoteric ideals and intellectualism were necessary evils to be kept in check lest revolutionaries disrupt a social order. Several similar mechanism exist in society to mitigate any natural impulse to replace an arbitrary hierarchy with a natural organization of society based in egalitarian truth. You have the egoists led off to become minor gods, leading groups of people. You have the righteous distracted by political campaigns in pursuit of justice. You have the altruists serving soup and sermons, cleaning up after the casualties of a modern society. Most predictable impulses to buck enslavement have been provided for. The majority of workers are content enough in their routines to keep going to work, abiding the law, dreaming the prescribed dreams, opining the slogans dictated by propaganda. Very few people will wind up thinking for themselves and us all for very long, and nearly all of those will live short and troubled lives on the outskirts of a society that punishes such behavior.

The public school is a training camp for Joe and Jane Public. Many such are produced. There need not be any great efficiency. Sloppy teaching by mediocre teachers is apt for dullard students, children of ignorant workers. It's supposed to be like it is. It does what is is meant to do.

The ideal a parent may have wanting for their child "great things in life" usually consists of a very narrow description of success. You can see it portrayed on TV in ads all day long. Great job, happy family, nice car, social status, white teeth. A good wage slave parent wants a future for their child that amounts to a successful wage slave life. Schools need only allow that dream. The parent needs to dream how the school can help the child have a better life through education, so the parent can keep their mind on work while their child is at school.

There was a pretty good debate a while back about education policy. The idiots won out, predictably, and so we had "outcome based education" being "implemented" nationwide. It turns out that teachers are to blame, and need to be held to standards of student performance. Evidently they were having some quality control problems at the schools. The products were defective; the students were not turning out like they were supposed to. The side that lost had the idea that when you acknowledge what learning is and provide an education meant to support individual minds, somehow as a net result of having an enlightened population the world sort of just improves because it cannot be helped, that smart people do smart things. That was a close call!

From my own experience what is missing, if it still is, is when you have sex education class they don't assign homework.

I agree with the OP wholeheartedly and have said the same thing for years. I was a senior in college when my roommate (who's father was an accountant and had taught him) taught me how to set up a budget. Saved my ass most of my adult life!

On a sidenote, I have a peeve with the lunch system in public schools. My daughter was in elementary school, she'd gets to school at 8am and her lunch is at 10:30 - typically isn't up for tacos essentially for breakfast, but by 1:00 is starving - but has to wait until almost 4pm to get home. When she gets home, she irritably races to the refrigerator.

Oh, and while we're at it - if your kid buys their lunch, it's $1.80 if they buy the meal, but if they don't get one item, it's ala carte - and around $4.50 - but since everything is on an account, they don't even know what they're being charged! I've had to tell my kid for years to give or throw the milk away if she doesn't want it, because it costs $2.00 extra not to get it.

Ok, off my soapbox now...

One big problem with schools today is that they often "teach to the test." This means that they teach things based on the standardized testing that is administered annually. I don't understand everything that goes on behind the scenes as far as funding or incentives, but if the kids do well, it's better for the school. It wasn't always this way. When I was a kid, teachers and schools had a lot more leeway to determine the curriculum.

As one very small example, Newsweek publishes an annual report of the top high schools in the nation, and one of their factors is how well the top schools do on these annual tests.

Bottom line is that subjects on the test get priority over those not on the test. So the next question is: who devises these tests and what criteria is used to determine their content? That I do not know.