this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2024
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Unpopular Opinion

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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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[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

This is kind of a 50/50 thing. Parents should be the ones teaching the children manners, morals and anything useful in life to survive it than school. School is the place that should be educating and challenging your learning ability while teaching you things parents can't. Parents can't come up with daily curriculums like a school can. But Schools can't teach things a parent should either, other than just jam it down your throat about believing yourself and aim high .etc

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

The problem is that even those parents don't know enough of that stuff to teach it to their kids. Either because they never learned it, or because the field has changed so much that their knowledge is outdated.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

I agree. Based on the comments I've read I think readers are interpreting it wrong maybe because Lemmy users tend to be young and many are students themselves, they see this as directed at them. Your post I assume is directed at the parents and people who someday intend to be parents. I'd also like to add that it's the parents job to teach their children discipline and to discipline their children. Public schools should teach about all religions, parents should be the ones to raise their children under their choice of religion. Parents should teach their children manners and mutual respect before sending them to school

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

Lemmy users tend to be young?

This place is full of grognards, compared to any other social media I've ever interacted with. Could still skew young in absolute terms, I suppose, but boy there's a lot of oldheads in here.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

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)

[–] [email protected] -1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

deleted. decided i don't have the energy to argue about this.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 3 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

If one parent dies, that's tragic. The surviving parent should seek support from friends and family to raise the child. If both parents die, that's even worse, and the kids should be placed either with their remaining family or with one willing to adopt them. That's an entirely separate apparatus.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 23 points 3 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

That's the problem. If parents didn't suck, we wouldn't have this genre of nonfiction.

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