The idea of mandatory education is to guarantee that you're provided basic skills to have a chance to survive a thrive in society regardless of your environment.

Not to refute or acknowledge your point, but it makes me think of Those who can - do, those who can't - teach.

While this is at best a very dubious sentiment, I've only really seen it applied to university lecturers. I don't see how it can reasonably be applied to primary/secondary teachers.

Such a disrespectful attitude towards some of the most important people in society. Disgraceful.

Professors teach, are they in that position because of some ineptitude? Of course not, the opposite.

On the whole university professors are terrible teachers. The concept of a professor wasting time giving a lecture to 100 people is surely at an end - far better to find the 1 in 100 professors who are good at teaching to record a lecture and give it to 10,000 people - where those people can pause, play it back as many times as they need, etc

This may surprise you but the reason professors teach is that they’re experts in their fields. Lecturing serves more purposes than simply educating, it allows immediate interaction over the subject matter as it is presented and intended. You are expected to show up at a lecture already knowing the contents, not as if you’re going to the cinema. This though is how people treat it.

Maybe one "should" learn those skills from ones parents, but I certainly didn't and I think the same is true for the majority of people these days.

Should the school system be designed for ideals that don't hold true, or for the real world?

I think that's a fair point. But I also think that the education system should have a levelling effect, where it doesn't matter who looks after you when you are at home - everyone has the same opportunities to learn.

Students' parents, guardians, extended cohabiting family, etc. have an impossibly diverse range of skills (and ability to communicate, etc.). Even if these people were available at all times, they remain a hugely variable source. If we're saying that practical life skills are important, we should aim to provide a consistent experience to avoid inequality in society.

I'm sure everyone has stories about how the people who raised them taught them a few things well and were terrible examples of others. Some of these will be funny, but others can have life changing consequences.

That's assuming the parents have those skills.

> Isn't the problem they are not available anymore?

Eh, no; they're probably more available on average these days. Average working hours are down quite a lot in most developed countries, and far more people have regular scheduled employment (vs working on a farm or similar, which could frequently be every waking hour for most of the year). But the assumption that most parents either know these things or are good at teaching them is... optimistic, to say the least.

That works if your parents ever learned practical life skills. Even parents who recognize they're lacking will struggle to pick those skills up.

Sometimes YouTube (or online courses) can help: https://www.youtube.com/c/DadhowdoI/

But sorting good information from bad is a skill on its own. People come up with all kinds of heuristics with varying efficacy.

Yeah, parents are busy working all day. But also the parents may have never learned the skills or know how to teach them.

I did do a bit of cooking at school but I learnt much more by watching mum cook.

I was cooking some of my own meals from when I was 14 or so - Ok this was only simple stuff

Yeah. Same here. I made my first dish at 7-8. We had a mini stove and I cooked corn with bunch of veggies on it. It was fun. Afterwards, I learnt to do more complex stuff due to single parent household.