Unpopular Opinion

Here's one, from what does money derive its value?

I mean, its the most important thing in our society. You'd think that they would make sure it was really hammered home.

Now, you'll be told that it has value simply because we believe it does which isn't untrue. Theyll say, you know, it's like gold that doesn't actually hold any value. We just believe it really hard.

The problem is, we value that gold is shiny, imperishable and we can make pretty things out of it. We didn't have a big meeting and just randomly decide that gold would be valuable.

Another problem is that money is an iou. Except its, apparently, an iou that isn't own to anyone and doesn't have to be repaid, making it fall short of the criteria for it being an iou.

Tbf our economists dont really need to think about that, as, due to how money is created and destroyed, the position nets off due to the debt being repaid, despite the above. Theres no need to consider the non hypothetical part.

What if the underlying asset was human labour? You know, like how cotton, sugar and steel used to be used as currency in Virginia, the west indies and Sheffield respectfully. Its just that we live in human labour farm and you're living capital. To me, considering modern monetary policy, its the only thing that makes sense.

The people who say "why doesn't school teach this" are the people who wouldn't learn it in school if they did. Also, some schools do teach it.

Agreed. It amazes me how little responsibility parents want to have for the education of their own children. We outsource it like a chore.

Many people's parents are not present in their lives at all or don't have these skills themselves to be able to pass on. What you're proposing will just result in more people growing up without these skills. School should teach a person everything they need to know for adulthood to ensure that everyone has the chance to learn it. If your parents reinforce those lessons even better.

Dude thinks everyone has parents like him, elaborates that no learning of vital information in school is necessary if he himself got the knowledge from his parents.

Some of your examples are just senseless. People don’t have DIY skills because of the increasing specialisation of our society. We’re not at home learning how to fix things, because we’re in school learning how to do other things instead.

This has been the case for so long in some places that a lot of peoples parents don’t have those skills to pass on in the first place.

i for one don't think we should rely on parents to make sure children live good lives, as controversial an opinion as that may be..

the idea of expecting at most 2 people to be wholly responsible for a child's upbringing is absolutely crazy, i don't understand how it has become standard practice. For most of humanity's history children were a communal responsibility, we need to bring back neighbourhood grandmas.

My kids definitely spend more waking hours at school. If they're doing extracurricular activities it isn't unusual for them to be gone from 7a to 9p. The earliest they get home is 6p. Oh and then they still have homework.

I'm from Eastern Europe so my take might be country specific and factually wrong from US perspective.

I also like to think about this from the teachers perspective. The common sentiment of why do we learn X when it won't be necessary for day-to-day life later is such a misplaced sense of disappointment on the kids and the parents part.

As an educator it's true that one's teaching with their whole being - be that e.g.: attitude and other non strictly subject related attributes. But in the current system - where the output requirement for high school does not include knowledge about the taxes, loans and other common sense skills - it's pointless to expect anything else from the teacher than what's in the curriculum.

Currently the point of high school is to get you prepared for your final exams (SAT in the US) in order to pursue higher education. That's it. If the teacher is better than average then you might get something else in the process. Something more than just knowledge about a subject.

I agree that getting skills to adapt to challenges should be emphasized more than lexical knowledge. This is not embraced by the current curriculum in Hungary but this is my point exactly. It's a systemic issue that cannot be fixed by expecting more from teachers.

EDIT: english can be hard.

Also, many of the things these people claim school didn't teach them were actually taught in school. Maybe not directly, but in most cases schools do teach all the basic things one needs to do, for example, a tax return. They simply didn't pay attention.

There are some topics that are just boring and not relevant to kids, even if those topics are important for them later as adults.

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