Unpopular Opinion

And what if one has shitty parents?

Where do you draw the line? Some people's parents teach them reading, writing and mathematics before they even enter the school system. Does that mean the school system shouldn't teach those three?

What if your parents don't know how to fix a clogged sink? Or to cook food more complicated than pasta with ketchup?

What do you see as the purpose of the schooling system?

Many people's parents are not present in their lives at all or don't have these skills themselves to be able to pass on. What you're proposing will just result in more people growing up without these skills. School should teach a person everything they need to know for adulthood to ensure that everyone has the chance to learn it. If your parents reinforce those lessons even better.

Dude thinks everyone has parents like him, elaborates that no learning of vital information in school is necessary if he himself got the knowledge from his parents.

There are no prerequisites for being a parent. There are MANY prerequisites for being a teacher. We should be fortifying the curriculum of our schools to give ALL students a good education, not allowing the birth lottery have as drastic of an effect on children as it currently does. Parents can be very helpful or nearly useless and schools should do their to help students recover from the failures of bad/unprepared parents

At the same time, parents should teach/reinforce all the lessons they think are critical, and not depend on an imperfect school system to do right by their child. If it's something your kid should know and be familiar with, teach it to them. If they already know about it from school, find out what they were taught and be careful to consider what's wrong and what's simply different from when you were taught it.

Kids should have no expectation on who should teach them what. They don't really have a say in the matter, they're children. Everyone responsible for those children needs to do everything they can to make sure the children get a fair shot once they start having a little more control over their own lives.

I'm glad my parents didn't teach me how to cook because if they had, my cooking would fucking suck.

i for one don't think we should rely on parents to make sure children live good lives, as controversial an opinion as that may be..

the idea of expecting at most 2 people to be wholly responsible for a child's upbringing is absolutely crazy, i don't understand how it has become standard practice. For most of humanity's history children were a communal responsibility, we need to bring back neighbourhood grandmas.

Not everybody has good parents. Or even parents that know this stuff themselves. Some people don't have two parents, or their parents work all the time. You might want to broaden your worldview. The schools are there to teach kids what they need to live as an adult, which should include basic life skills. They already offer home economics, where she teaches you how to do things and basic enough level that you can make spaghetti and sew a button back on. There's no reason why they shouldn't have something about balancing your checkbook, keeping a budget, not going into credit card debt, etc. It's just that the idiots in power haven't figured that all out yet.

The people who say "why doesn't school teach this" are the people who wouldn't learn it in school if they did. Also, some schools do teach it.

Some of your examples are just senseless. People don’t have DIY skills because of the increasing specialisation of our society. We’re not at home learning how to fix things, because we’re in school learning how to do other things instead.

This has been the case for so long in some places that a lot of peoples parents don’t have those skills to pass on in the first place.

I sort of agree in that parents should teach in addition to schools. However, this feels like entitlement showing because it makes a bunch of assumptions about parents (that others have already commented on), but just even having parents. There are a lot of people who only have one parent, or no parents for various reasons. What about kids who lost one of their parents to cancer and their remaining parent doesn't have the capacity to teach the subjects you mentioned? Schools provide an opportunity for common education for everyone.

Nah because many many parents totally fucking suck and don't teach their kids shit.

Just gonna add this to the pile.

Most kids spend more time at school than at home, and during their prime functioning hours, and their teachers prime functioning hours. Kids come home to parents that are often burned out by their job. We still do our best for our kids, but the vast majority of us aren't professionally trained teachers, either.

I'm not saying schools should be in charge of everything a kid learns, but if there's a baseline expectation of knowledge that we expect from every adult in our society, then yeah, we probably do want our children to learn those things in school so we can at least try to ensure every kid gets a chance to learn them.

Okay, but my parents were shit, so I learned nothing from anybody.

I'm from Eastern Europe so my take might be country specific and factually wrong from US perspective.

I also like to think about this from the teachers perspective. The common sentiment of why do we learn X when it won't be necessary for day-to-day life later is such a misplaced sense of disappointment on the kids and the parents part.

As an educator it's true that one's teaching with their whole being - be that e.g.: attitude and other non strictly subject related attributes. But in the current system - where the output requirement for high school does not include knowledge about the taxes, loans and other common sense skills - it's pointless to expect anything else from the teacher than what's in the curriculum.

Currently the point of high school is to get you prepared for your final exams (SAT in the US) in order to pursue higher education. That's it. If the teacher is better than average then you might get something else in the process. Something more than just knowledge about a subject.

I agree that getting skills to adapt to challenges should be emphasized more than lexical knowledge. This is not embraced by the current curriculum in Hungary but this is my point exactly. It's a systemic issue that cannot be fixed by expecting more from teachers.

EDIT: english can be hard.

I agree, under ideal conditions, parents should have the time and ability to teach their kids many things. At the same time, I believe in the "... sins of the father ...", and "... it takes a village ..." aphorisms.

I think some stuff is on the person themselves as well to be honest. The one I hear a lot is about “School should have taught us about taxes”. Except that school probably did teach you, it taught reading, maths, and general research (Google) skills.

The tax code changes all the time so it would be pointless to teach you about it 5-10 years before you’ll actually be doing it.

Plus the people I’ve heard this from in my own life, have been people that I know would not have paid attention to it in school anyway

My kids definitely spend more waking hours at school. If they're doing extracurricular activities it isn't unusual for them to be gone from 7a to 9p. The earliest they get home is 6p. Oh and then they still have homework.

Also, many of the things these people claim school didn't teach them were actually taught in school. Maybe not directly, but in most cases schools do teach all the basic things one needs to do, for example, a tax return. They simply didn't pay attention.

At school, i had a class that was supposed to teach us about paying taxes, how stuff are made, how stuff work etc.ee

The teacher played poker on his laptop instead of teaching

Edit: for my opinion on the post: some parents cant My father has been working in a different country for longer than i was born, my mother is extremely busy and, including homework and travel, I do school stuff longer than doing other stuff(excluding sleep)

There are some topics that are just boring and not relevant to kids, even if those topics are important for them later as adults.

Here's one, from what does money derive its value?

I mean, its the most important thing in our society. You'd think that they would make sure it was really hammered home.

Now, you'll be told that it has value simply because we believe it does which isn't untrue. Theyll say, you know, it's like gold that doesn't actually hold any value. We just believe it really hard.

The problem is, we value that gold is shiny, imperishable and we can make pretty things out of it. We didn't have a big meeting and just randomly decide that gold would be valuable.

Another problem is that money is an iou. Except its, apparently, an iou that isn't own to anyone and doesn't have to be repaid, making it fall short of the criteria for it being an iou.

Tbf our economists dont really need to think about that, as, due to how money is created and destroyed, the position nets off due to the debt being repaid, despite the above. Theres no need to consider the non hypothetical part.

What if the underlying asset was human labour? You know, like how cotton, sugar and steel used to be used as currency in Virginia, the west indies and Sheffield respectfully. Its just that we live in human labour farm and you're living capital. To me, considering modern monetary policy, its the only thing that makes sense.

Agreed. It amazes me how little responsibility parents want to have for the education of their own children. We outsource it like a chore.