Most of this used to be on the curriculum - Home Economics and Craft, Design and Technology have gone out of fashion, but covered the practical things. My school had a vehicle workshop as well as kitchen classrooms. Oh, and a typing pool, too :)

This got me thinking - I wonder how much of that comes down to mundane reasons like budgets, rather than pedagogy. Change costs money and most schools are slow moving. For example, I suspect that the content of secondary school mathematics have changed little in generations, but the content of practical lessons in cooking, vehicle maintenance, finances, programming, etc. changes much faster.

I want to throw out another angle that I think is relevant:

The curriculum broadly is determined by the school board.

The school board tends to be made up of more "well off" people.

They will prioritize the types of classes that they took to get them where they are.

If you are on the school board, you are most likely not a house wife, not a mechanic, not a seamstress, etc.

So you get a prioritization on classes that lead you down the "four year degree, rise to management" type of life.

A lot comes down to budget I think. Schools are judged mainly on standardized testing scores and funds will be allocated to ensure optimization of that metric.

Schools mainly get funded through local property taxes. If you compare curriculum in towns that are generally middle and upper middle class with towns that have a larger lower middle class population you’ll probably see different curriculum. More AP classes, electives, life planning, etc.

The town I live in has pretty high taxes but it’s mainly to fund the local school system which ranks high. Just about everyone with kids uses the public school system because of this and it’s a big selling point to new residents home-shopping.

But we pay for it.

Do nutrition & medicine not get taught in science lessons? They were for me (in the UK).

Also, not sure 15 year old me could have imagined something less interesting than finance lessons where I get to figure out how to manage all the money I don’t have.

They do in South Florida when I was growing up. I also had a half year of health class, which includes nutrition. I also had home economics class, which covered nutrition, cooking, sewing, budgeting, etc. But my understanding is that those are getting cut in order to have kids focus on classes to pass tests.

> Cooking, Nutrition, Medicine, Drugs & Vitamins,

We had health class for a few years at my school.

> Finance

We had some basic finance, but I would have liked more. We covered writing a check and balancing a checkbook. I'd have liked to see more about calculating compound interest, as well as a primer on how taxes work. I can see the tax lesson failing, though, if it was too long before I got an actual job.

> Basic electronics

This was covered in college, but not high school. I'm not sure this is very practical for most people, either. People need to know how to use computers, but not necessarily how to design a circuit board.

Ah how to format word documents :-)

I did in the 1970's computer programming at my comprehensive and we started with adders, half adders and machine language programming BTW this was for the CSE stream (this not going to university)