The discipline isn't, but the way at least I've been taught it unfortunately is... It didn't take me until I graduated to take an interest in history, when I could learn the cause and effect chains without getting distracted by rote memorization.

If I'm being honest with myself, my answer is probably no. "If only they taught _" for me, can be boiled down to "If only I was 30 in grade school"

I wonder about this type of thing a lot when I think of my experience in school. a lot of the material they taught me in lower and middle school was just wrong. not like subtly wrong, but blatantly incorrect in a way that would be obvious to any undergrad major in that subject (which schoolteachers often are). I'm sure the teachers must have realized too. why spend so much time teaching stuff that needs to be unlearned as early as high school?

the best example I can think of right now is the answer to "why is the sky blue?". my lower school science teacher told us it was reflecting the ocean. I'm sure she realized this answer didn't make any sense, but that's what she taught us. I don't expect teachers to try to explain raleigh scattering to a group of third graders, but wouldn't it be better just not to explain it at all?

Who's Rayleigh?

I can understand teaching general rules upfront with the expectation that exceptions will be covered later (eg, teaching lower school students that water boils at 212F/100C is okay, they can learn about vapor pressure later). but why would you teach that columbus was the first european to discover north america? not only is it completely wrong, but it's not a practically useful fact, nor does it create a solid basis for deeper understanding.

Even if you select for ability along some axis, you still get different interests and learning styles - and personalities.

Learning is basically industrial, uselessly abstracted [1] and commodified, when it could be individualised. A lot of talent is wasted because high school stunts the really bright kids. And given how brutal it is, it seems to damage everyone emotionally.

[1] Virtually none of the math you learn at school really makes any sense unless you're one of the small number of people who go into STEM - which is where you finally discover what it's for. Things are a bit better than they used to be, but basic financial math as a specific competence is far more useful to most of the population than even the most basic algebra and trig.

For instance: How long was WWII? How long was Vietnam? When exactly did WWII start, before or after US involvement? Knowing those sorts of dates allows students to put today's wars into context. Has the US been in Iraq longer than WWII? Longer than Vietnam? They can memorize the dates and answer those questions themselves. That makes them informed citizens, and some of them eventual informed soldiers, better able to participate in very relevant current events.

You know what is completely useless? Telling the date each happened on their respective classes, and that this knowledge will be tested.

Memorizing dates is as dull as it can be, without having motivation from knowing the context. Dull things get crammed for tests and then forgotten, with near zero retention when those people grow up and actually want to use the context.

Even if dates were more important than causes, they stick less, reducing the utility of teaching them.

in a weird contrast, we spent tons of time on the civil war and slavery (and not just the sugar-coated version either). we learned about thomas jefferson and sally hemings, and we learned about andrew jackson and the trail of tears. so I don't think it was out of squeamishness that they declined to cover more recent history.

I get that schools (especially private schools) ultimately need to satisfy the parents, but it strikes me as a massive disservice that my peers and I were able to graduate high school without learning a single thing to contextualize the two defining current events of our childhood: 9/11 and the iraq war. the film charlie wilson's war was the best explanation I got until I was in college.

Although to be fair, history textbooks are often really terrible.

While this may exaggerate the case, it will continue to largely be true so long as we relegate huge portions of our population to 2-3 jobs while the VC system sustained in part by Ycombinator rewards capital formation to a degree that is damaging to society.

Usually when people say they are working 2-3 jobs I believe they mean they get a couple of shifts a week from a couple of different employers.

E.g. 16 hours a week at a coffee shop, 12 hours a week at a restaurant and 2 nights a week as a cleaner.

I understood the comment to be angry about some large injustice, I'm not sure whether they were meaning to essentially say "some people have to work for a living, it's outrageous". With (Western) Europe's extremely strong social systems, the number of people who are forced to work multiple jobs because they wouldn't be able to eat otherwise is minuscule, I believe.

As much as I agree with other points, I can only strongly disagree here. It strongly implies a condescending attitude that stupid and uneducated decided about British future. If only they could be brainwashed^H taught they would choose the “right” option.

If people at large understood what happened and why we have the institutions we currently have, they are shown to be far more likely to be in favour of them.

For serious analyses of the Brexit question by extremely well equipped academics (I rather think they 'understand') and others try https://briefingsforbritain.co.uk/

It's not condescending in the slightest, and debate around Brexit revealed that although theres's nothing wrong with being against european integration, a lot of people have almost no idea of what the EU does and does not do.

We (collectively) want all children to have a good foundation of life skills by the time they reach adulthood.

Unfortunately there is no curriculum for what a parent must teach their children.

Luckily, there is a standardized curriculum in the form of schooling.

Instead of assuming all children get good parents (which is obviously a harmful assumption), let’s just take advantage of the fact that we can pretty much guarantee all students will learn the school curriculum and use it to teach important life skills to children who otherwise wouldn’t learn.

Why not use that math class to teach personal finance, mortgage rates, basic economics, etc.

Why not couple English with a stronger focus on proper communication (especially negotiation, conflict resolution)

etc.

Teachers are given a document that says in X weeks you need to cover the following topics/units. Let's fix that document so that we can ensure everyone who graduates the public school system can confidently understand their credit card statement -- regardless of their parental upbringing.

> Let's fix that document so that we can ensure everyone who graduates the public school system can confidently understand their credit card statement

I'm pretty sure by age 14 my school math problems were along the lines of "John takes out a loan for $x, with a compounding interest rate of Y%, how much does he pay back in total?"

I agree that we could do better at teaching however!

I do not believe that having a specific curriculum is necessary to have a good foundation of life skills. In addition I would argue that the curriculum in schools is absolutely disappointing if this is the target.

> Instead of assuming all children get good parents (which is obviously a harmful assumption), let’s just take advantage of the fact that we can pretty much guarantee all students will learn the school curriculum and use it to teach important life skills to children who otherwise wouldn’t learn.

The issue here is that you are basically torturing these students that would end up learning (either due to their parents or to some other resource) regardless in order to improve the life of these that would not. I would understand your point however if school was not mandatory.

I completely agree that the physical activity is important, but then let's not pretend that it's educative when it isn't.

Due to all my previous negative experience, I chose to sort-of-quit PE altogether. It was impossible to actually quit, but you could compensate it with an equal amount of extra credit, so I happily replaced it with Arts credit.

Surprisingly, no one as much as batted an eyelid at that. The snobby attitude of "who needs PE anyway" was certainly prevalent in my age group.

Workspaces aren't educative, of themselves, but they're a pretty important facet of running a school.

It feels like PE was 2-3 years of gymnastics followed by 6-7 years of "let's just play basketball/volleyball/soccer" with a semester of swimming here-and-there. Certainly no instructions or structure to any of it.

As a fat kid, I was always the happiest when sitting out entirely (or swimming, where it turns out natural buoyancy is actually helpful).

Always getting Ds and Fs and being chosen last for any team activity led to me spend my college years on the couch.

Only through getting back pain and posture problems I found out 5 years later that I enjoy jogging and yoga and weightlifting and isometric exercise - if properly instructed.

It feels like I missed out on the years in between simply because PE at school never had the goal of helping kids be healthy - just keeping them busy in any way possible.

I think you need to face this fact to understand schooling in 2020.

And if quarantine changed anything, it is that I value school more then before. And I am not one of those people desperate to somehow making remote school and work function, thankfully we had no stressful deadlines during that time. But the kids still missed it and still learned better when in school then home alone.

It's better if school policy can be discussed admitting it has two main purposes.

The financial education and time management lines really resonated with me from the parent comment. The problem is that there is not anything resembling equal footing at home. Rich kids, realistically the top 5-10%, are going to get financial education at home and the others will have to learn in the school of hard knocks. I had to learn “tough” lessons about finance because the resources for what I needed to know didn’t exist at home. And I talk to people now who are older about how they prep their kids for the world, and it’s just a classic information imbalance. You could do a lot of good by leveling the playing field here.

Physical Education wasn't my favorite class, but never once did anyone talk about the theory behind developing athletic performance or recruiting the proper muscles for a movement or anything like that. It was just "go run" or "play a game of baseball".

But I agree that there is some lost potential in terms of building a strong knowledge base about fitness and well-being. The paper below suggests there are likely a lot of moderating factors in the benefits of PE.

https://sci-hub.tw/https://doi.org/10.1080/02671520701809817

Meanwhile they prevent my generation from building houses and rob our pensions.

Modern school systems are pretty much entirely this... only they aren't really glorified. To be fair, a society in which every adult is expected to be working needs some kind of daycare for kids, but there are probably better ways to go about it.

Which, that sentiment applies directly to history.

A study has shown that PE in schools have show it has zero benefits and only teaches some kinds to skip classes.

You'll need a slightly stronger argument to meaningfully shape this debate