Unpopular Opinion

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"Stuff school should have taught me" material is actually stuff your parents should have taught you. (self.unpopularopinion)

submitted 3 months ago by the_toast_is_gone to c/unpopularopinion

93 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Schools shouldn't be treated as these magical places where you're put in at some age and over a decade later you emerge a complete human being. You have parents and you spend more time at home than at school for a reason: you're supposed to learn from your parents.

A school can potentially give you a degree of financial literacy instruction. Your parents should be the ones paying your allowance money and driving you to the bank to get your first checking account. A school can teach you how to cook something. Your parents should be the ones eating your food and helping you cook it better. A school can show you some level of DIY. Your parents should directly benefit from teaching you how to fix the sink when it gets clogged. A school can tell you what kinds of careers exist. Your parents should love you enough to tell you that either your career ambitions or your financial expectations need to change. A school can tell you how to build a resume. Your parents should be the ones driving you to your job interview and to your job until you buy your first car. A school can give you a failing grade when you do poorly on a test. Your parents should be able to make you face the real, in-the-moment consequences of doing something wrong.

Expecting a school, public or private, to teach you everything you need to know is a grave mistake. You need people in your corner who are taking an active part in raising you all the way to adulthood and beyond. If you have kids yourself, that goes for them as well. If you aren't there for your children, to teach them the things that schools don't teach because they can't mass produce the lessons to nearly the same quality that you can give them, they'll blame you and the school for having failed them. And they'd be right to lay the blame at your feet.

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[–] DrCake 6 points 3 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] -2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Okay, I can kind of sort of get behind you on this but, there should be at least like a basic civics class that covers the general topics that you are likely to encounter as a functioning adult in society.

My mom let me do our taxes when I was 13.

She then reviewed what I had done, helping me along the way of course, and pointed out some things that I had missed.

When I was 14 I got to do them again, and she reviewed them and noted that I had done them very well. I have never had any issues doing my taxes as an adult and I've never paid a preparer to do my taxes for me.

This simple experiment has saved me several hundred dollars if not several thousand dollars over my life.

And it was literally easier for her because she had to do less work.

So I agree with the original poster that parents should be responsible for teaching their children all of the things that school will not teach them, and I also agree with you that it's not that much to expect people to learn these things for themselves.

But, I also have to throw in the fact that I have always been an exceptional learner, and so I can't compare my own experiences with that of the average because I don't know how much my innate thirst for knowledge has biased me towards competence in this area above that of my peers.

[–] IAmNotACat 3 points 3 months ago

My dad did the same thing with me. It was obviously very helpful, but it’s not like there isn’t an obvious prerequisite.

Not everyone’s parents are financially competent nor will they have the time to successfully coordinate an effort like that on top of everything else they might be required to do.

Additionally, what function do we expect of school? Is it to equalise, for young adults, those opportunities normally limited by education? Then it should teach those things which are important that not everyone’s parents are capable of teaching.

The other point is that school is the main temporal and logistical barrier to actually teaching your children as a parent. Between work and school and the other bureaucratic necessities of life, there isn’t always significant time a parent can spend with their child.