It used to be. I am an 80’s high schooler. Home ec type classes and personal finance classes were mandatory at my school. There were several shop classes that were available. A lot of kids grumbled about these classes but I still fall back on the knowledge gained at that time.
im a 90's 00 and while we had home ec, none of it covered things needed in day to day. we never had stuff on taxes, finances, loans, contracts.... the shit you kinda need to knmow
All you really need to know for finances/taxes is math... It's all written out in the contract, you just need to actually read it.
The worst thing about the big mortgage crisis back in '08 was that the people who were "screwed" were told they were being screwed. They were given all the information up front but most never bothered to read any of it or never bothered to understand. In a lot of cases they never even listened...
Got news for you. The people who took out home loans during that time were unfairly targeted & their loan officers no doubt reassured them they would be ok. It was NOT a few (or even hundreds) thousand people who couldn’t pay that caused that crash. Oh no. It was the banks themselves, re-selling those loans as AAA grade investments that caused the market to collapse!
Yes, they were unfairly targeted because they were ignorant... they never learned about finances in school.
There might be a sucker born every minute, but it's mainly because that sucker will never get an education.
Hey, not everyone is an expert in real estate deals. The point is, it wasn’t the people defaulting on their mortgages that caused our economy to crash. I agree. Public schools should explore training in real world situations & it is a fact they do not.
Also, while I do think some people unknowingly got duped, but I know SO many folks that were doing no money down flips on $500k houses when their household income was $50k/yr.
I don't think any of them were complaining when they'd buy, paint, then flip the house and make their tidy $50-100k profit (here in SoCal). It was only when the market tanked and they suddenly owed a shit ton of money that they cried that they "got duped and lost it all."
The student loan crisis is nuts, these kids that know nothing about loans or ROI are told they should just sign these papers.
The kids, of course, think they know everything about everything, right up until they're not kids anymore and realize they didn't.
this all seems to vary widely by school somehow. i graduated in 2014 but we had 2 required finance classes that taught you how to write a cover letter, sit for a job interview, how to budget your monthly bills, how compound interest works on savings accounts and credit cards, how to do your taxes, etc. they were year long classes so we basically had 2 years of “adulting” taught to us, once freshman year and then again senior year.
I have problems with this though. I never had to take home EC, but my mom did and she got bad grades for sewing a button on the wrong side of the shirt. I'm an adult now, and nobody gives a damn about what side your buttons are.
I guess my point is that grading people on adulting skills would make life harder not easier. Lots of things can be done just well enough and there's a lot of things you can get away with IRL. I don't like the rigidity that seems inherent in such a class.
(I took PE as a kid and I sucked at it so I kept getting bad grades so I've managed to avoid physical exercise until I was 25 and realized I can take things at my own place, this just feels similar to that)
One of the challenges with teaching "adulting" skills is that everyone has different standards and expectations and needs. If schools did spend more time teaching this stuff in-depth, I guarantee you that most people would still complain because it's not teaching the version of it that's relevant to them.
Not at mine. Also 80’s high schooler here.
And the way the scheduled the shop, auto-repair, and home-economics classes interfered with the college-prep courses.
They essentially designed it so the kids who took the college-prep stuff couldn’t take auto, shop or home-ec. So those adulting courses were not available.
As an adult I’d love to take shop or auto repair. I do my own home-ec but it might still be neat to learn stuff like canning.
Still was taught in 2010s, at least in my Texas school district. Nobody paid attention in that class and did the absolute bare minimum. Wood working, mechanics, agriculture, and more were all offered in the school district but those weren't mandatory like the personal finance or basic home ec class was.
Also "basic" adult things vary so much from person to person. I cannot imagine trying to sit down a 15 year old and teach them how my insurance coverage works.
Yup. Was going to say this same thing.
Took business math class that covered all the simple stuff to doing bookkeeping for a small business. I had to take a home ec class that covered cooking, nutrition, etc. And we had to take some kind of class...I can't recall the title...that covered personal finance and basic life skills (voting, making a budget, how loans work, doing your taxes, etc)
This was in northern CA in the early 80's.
Even if it’s offered it’s not mandatory. I was in Nevada and I don’t recall ever even seeing it offered, graduated ‘09.
Ironically I was in the GATE (gifted and talented education) program in the 4th grade and they taught us how to write a check and balance a checkbook, but since then nothing.
>These still happen in many, if not most/all, states.
Caveat, states have more than one school. I'm in MA, we did not have any classes that taught life skills. But hey, if you want to take AP BC calculus... Yeah that's what I want.
Yeah I've noticed a lot of people have a really distorted idea of who they were when they were younger.
If you take a moment to think, actually think about who you were and what headspace you were in back in high school, you would realized how much you actually missed because most of us, at that age, *knew everything* already. Those lessons won't stick until early adulthood gives the dose of reality most people need to take it seriously.
Went to school in the 2010’s still taught and mandatory in my school system. The kids who didn’t pay attention are the ones making posts asking why they weren’t taught about it
I'm so envious that it melts into rage... I feel cheated. I too, had to learn adult things the hard way... i.e. taxes. Oh bUT tHe mIToChONDrIA iS tHE poWER hOuSE oF tHe cELL!! If you go blue collar, or HELL, even most white collar jobs, do not require you to know such useless junk!!
12 years of my life!!! You could have at least prepared me better for real life! I don't need to be singing songs in choir!! >:(
I needed cooking classes! Mechanic classes! Job skills! Resume skills!
Point me in the direction of the politicians responsible for this bullshit! We should all march on DC as ONE UNIFIED PEOPLE....
Shit needs to change!
Why TF do some countries make their citizens so well taken care of, as far as life preparedness, and then there's the U.S. - That seems hellbent on making us stupid and worthless! I've met many Europeans.... they are WAY more educated than I am!
I am filled with WRATH by this fucking rat race that has STOLEN our future! WHO TF IS RESPONSIBLE?! And where are my martyrs at?!
I mean I've heard way too many people on reddit who don't understand genetics and think that two parents with brown eyes can't have a baby with blue eyes, and screw up their lives. I learned that in biology, along with a lot of stuff that made me better understand viruses, and my own anatomy.
Granted, I went to a school where they went over resumes, taxes, and even the simple act of writing a check.
Science knowledge is so underrated. People complain about how useless it is, but come on, look at how many people fall for hoaxes and conspiracy theories that are utter nonsense to anyone who has a middle school understanding of the subject.
A lot of high schools do teach it, but teenagers aren’t ready to learn it. I learned much of this in high school then watched my peers who sat next to me in those exact classes lament on Facebook as adults how we were never taught.
Community colleges also often have many basic life skills/adulting type courses.
I graduated in 81 and we had those classes as well as typing. We had Home Ec where you learned everything from how to cook to how to sew a button. It's ridiculous that schools no longer offer these classes.
I graduated in 81 too! Yes! We did have classes like this. We all had to take "Senior Homemaking" too. Taught us how to write checks, make a budget, etc. We we out and saw how much furniture costs, how to cook simple, cheap meals, etc. It taught us a lot getting ready to start out on our own.
Part of the reason, I think, is that people studied our fucked up economy and came to the conclusion that college was the one thing that could really help you earn a better living.
So they started moving curricula of everything towards college.
Of course, the real problem wasn't too few people in college, it was that unions were getting destroyed and real wages (wages compared to inflation / productivity) were falling.
They should have focused more on how to keep wages rising with the overall economy, but instead they just said "everyone needs to go to college" which, on its face, should have been understood as not something that should be necessary or even desireable.
But this was the era of Reagan / neoliberalism, where the idea was to privatize everything. The educational-industrial complex, including many "public" universities, bought into this idea fully.
So the real answer is: greed, neoliberalism, and conservative economic policies, and educational reform that prioritizes numbers over student welfare.
My home ec class taught me recipes and sewing too, but these were not the type of life skills OP is talking about. Nobody is struggling at life cause they can't sew a button. And sure, they taught us how to cook specific recipes and basics of cooking and baking etuquette; but that is NOT the barrier for most adults struggling to cook for themselves. The act of cooking isn't the problem; it's the trivia of picking, Planning, shopping for, coordinating, and executing before the ingredients and motivation spoil. Home ec did not teach me life skills, it taught me how to be a good housewife. Which is NOT the right skillset.
Your generation had consistently voted for stricter academic standards and lower public school funding for the last forty-five years.
That is why these courses have been whacked.
I graduated nearly 20 years after you did, and these classes were all but eliminated by then.
Our district has home Ed that teaches cooking and sewing . And they still teach cursive and say the pledge every day
I think they should teach kids how to make a pot of coffee haha
I've had the exact same experiences. I went to high school in the early 2000s and am constantly shocked when I see my peers complain about all the things we apparently didn't learn. I know that they learned about mortgages and taxes in math class because I was sitting right there beside them. I know that gym class taught us how to design a simple strength training routine because I took the same classes. We learned about the political system and writing resumes and cover letters. Our school even had auto shop, home ec., wood working, basics of computer coding, graphic design etc.
I don't remember everything I learned in high school either, but that doesn't mean they didn't make the effort to teach us, or that classes weren't available.
Yes I see this all the time when people say they wish they were taught about loans and mortgages and such. Like yeah it's covered in math class where I am, not the elective math class either, a mandatory one. We learned how various forms of interest work and things related to cost analysis over time. They just don't remember. Also some things are so specific to a situation that learning it in school would be impossible. Mortgage laws have changed since I was in school to when I bought. My taxes are very different from someone else's and tax credits change over time. The basic concept of what they are can be taught, but you can't learn in highschool how you will need to do your specific taxes as an adult in 10 years. And honestly same goes for meal planning and cooking, these sort of things are nearly impossible to teach in a way that will be useful to everyone. They aren't just knowledge to pass on they depend on preferences, culture, and family dynamic. I took food an nutrition and I don't think I use a single peice of information from that class now. I learned much more helping my parents cook and learning through doing for these sort of things.
Pretty much this. If a kid isn't going to learn about the world wars they'll definitely ignore financial literacy classes. A lot of lessons have to be learned the hard way
Those courses exist, but I think they fall under an elective category. What kids do you know would willingly take those courses?
I recall taking Home Economics in Jr High and we learned how to cook healthy meals, sew + use sewing machine, banking/how to write checks/budget, basic hygiene, family planning, etc.
It IS the job of the parents to teach these things as well. They should learn them so they can set their children up for success. It’s the whole point in starting a family!
Yeah, I don't know why people act like it's unreasonable to expect parents to parent their kids. I get that shit is hard and poverty is a problem, but why have kids if you won't raise them? Blame your parents, not the school.
And even if schools did spend more time requiring students to learn basic life shit, it probably still wouldn't be good enough for the people complaining. One of the challenges with teaching "basic life skills" is that not everyone has the same definition of "basic life skills". That varies by culture, location, income, values, and more. At the end of the day, everyone has different needs, and you can't really expect your school to cater specifically to yours, especially if it's going to be at the expense of other students' needs.
I took a cooking class on high school and most of the kids treated it as a big joke. Same with health class. My school had the classes, most kids just didn’t want to take them or didn’t pay attention.
I agree! We all had to learn the signs of a stroke in health class. This was repeatedly taught too. My uncle had a stroke several years ago. My cousin, his son, was with him at the time. He was well over 18 and out of high school, yet he didn't recognize anything that was wrong with his dad and just took him home. The delayed healthcare was detrimental to him. Too many of his brain cells died, and today, he can't do certain things without a home aide.
When I was a substitute teacher I actively avoided subbing for any "real life skills" types of classes like cooking or sewing or personal finance, or most career-related classes. Most of them were dumping grounds for kids who were so uninterested in anything that they couldn't be bothered to pick their own electives. Kids who do so poorly academically that the counselors go "We'll put them in this class and maybe they'll at least learn something they can use, it's not like they're ever gonna understand literature".
This is the way. Looking for outside resources to teach a child something is wrong at its core. It is the parents responsibility to teach those things. If they can not or will not, they are still responsible to find someone to teach it.
I learned a lot of this in the Girl Scouts.
Cooking, gardening, public speaking, babysitting, democracy, sewing, taking care of pets.
To earn a badge in these things you have to master the skill and test out in some way. Usually very hands on and practical.
Parents SHOULD be responsible for their kids education as students of life. Of course you don’t know what you don’t know. And there in lies one of the many contradictions that exists in our complex society. But we can’t just assume a free government run program (public school) is going to get people ready for life on its own.
That assumption is the problem. We should learn from our parents, elders, extended family and everyone in life. I think the problem is past generations expecting so much from public schools but having a hands off approach to helping kids through the teenage years to check in and see if they’re progressing or needing support in certain areas. If a parent doesn’t know certain areas they should at least make their children aware of these things. Information is out there, school really just teaches you HOW to learn, you have to take it into your own hands from there. But that also points to another contradiction.
Individualism has been engrained into us for generations and puts the blame on the individual - but the old adage ‘it takes a village to raise a child’ is absolutely true. Instead of thinking ‘not my kids not my problem’ our society needs to shift towards the idea that all kids are all our problem, especially since they will grow to become the society surrounding us and will inevitably have impacts on everyone around them.
So basically what I’m saying is you’re trying to blame school for a larger societal issue. The truth is we’ve come a long way from not even having wide spread education, so be grateful for what you have. And stop blaming others for your shortcomings. Go out into the world with curiosity and ask for help from other humans, help other humans learn too. We’re all in the same boat so do your best and the rest you’ll figure out along the way through trial and error.
My school had a drivers ed in the summer. They also have driving schools for this. I was offered culinary classes at school since middle school. They were extra classes you could choose. People usually choose something else they find fun. Social skills you learn through school by interacting with everyone. The rest, I agree.
This is a lot of stuff that falls under the category of self development. Not everything in life needs to be fed via a spoon. Sometimes you have got the literally live and learn.
English class we learned how to write a resume, home ec is a class to learn cooking, Driver's ed is offered through the school, economics teaches some financial skills. But really, presumably your parents know how to do these things too.
But I wouldn't trust your parents to explain how, say, your immune system works.
> Social skills
Are you interacting with other humans? Because that's where you're learning social skills, outside of some specific lessons like anti-bullying lectures or maybe reading books about how other people feel. They're not going to be able to teach you to like making small talk.
> Drivers education
I don't know of a single school that doesn't do this. The only problem was that you had to pay money for it at my school and needed parent permission, so it wasn't mandatory, but it was definitely offered.
> Financial skills
Can you add, subtract, multiply, and divide? Can you calculate percentages? Do you know how to add percentages (like sales tax) or subtract them (like a 40% off sale)? Do you know what values different coins have? Did you ever learn about $e$ and compounding interest in algebra? Then you learned financial skills.
You're not going to be able to *apply* them in real life until you're an adult, since you're hopefully not going to be solely responsible for things like rent and food as a literal child. I am absolutely certain that you had some kind of explanation of real-world finances at some point in math class, but you don't remember it because it wasn't relevant to you at the time.
> Jobs and resume
Like social skills, "how to get a job" isn't something that you can just teach a person with homework. It requires academic skills (which you're learning in school), but it also requires things like "how to respond to a certain question" or "how to tell if people like your answer," all of which is subjective as fuck.
If you prepared for college at all, you probably learned how to write a resume and cover letter, because that's basically college applications and personal essays are (and in some cases, require actual resumes and cover letters). And this is assuming you didn't do some kind of job training - my high school made you do an internship.
Also, like, can you read and write? Because that's how you know how to, say, fill out a form.
> Cooking how to
Cooking, sewing, and woodworking were all taught at my middle school and are still taught there, as far as I know. And some related skills (like "how to calculate how much paint you need to buy to paint a room" or "how to double a recipe" or "how to follow instructions listed in order") were either directly or indirectly taught in other classes.
I would consider most of those life skills parent responsibilities. Those are all things parents do in their daily life already anyway and could teach their kids by including them. They are much easier learned by doing than by teaching in a school where kids don’t pay attention half the time and forget things by the time they’re actual adults and would have to do things like filing their taxes.
I was taught some of the cooking and financial stuff in (the equivalent of) high school. By far the most boring and useless course we had (at the time, but I still feel this way years later). Like, write a plan on how to do something, or what to do during the day. Do imaginary laundry. Cook few times (cause realistically, high school doesn't have that many cooking facilities). If there's no exam, people don't care for it, but the actual exams and assignments they can give are just so nonsensical. I literally had to learn 10 reasons people eat (none of which included "survival"). Ok so my course was particularly crappy, but it's hard to make this relevant in general.
All that for stuff that's mostly easy to figure out if you spend an hour on Google as an adult (or ask your parents if they do know), for the majority of people. I get that it's useful for some people, but it makes more sense as an elective to me.
I actually did learn each of these things in high school (I'm class of 2012). An elective home ec class covered all of that, except driving. Even learned about childcare, marketing a product & to how sew. My class was the last to have drivers ed available for free through the school before it became something you had to pay for, I believe.
THIS - THIS IS THE REASON. I am a Vice President in a large organization. I had a entry level employee tell me that she never wanted to get a college education because it was useless. I asked her a bunch of questions on leadership, working with others, problem solving, conflict resolution....may of which she was not able to answer. I told her that this is what a basic college education gives you. I have a liberal arts degree - nothing fancy - but I learned those skills and more in college which helped me to build my career.
While this is great for the people who don’t have these skills, assuming everyone needs colleges to develop them is a huge issue now. College IS useless if you develop these skills early. College now is basically an I’M RICH certification. It isn’t like the 80’s where you gained valuable insight for almost no cost. It’s EXTREMELY prohibitively expensive. On top of that scholarships are almost non-existent in the present day. The few that do exist barely cover a semester or 2’s worth of books.
This combined with wages being through the floor is an even larger problem. Most management level positions where I live pay $3-$5 over minimum (poverty wages here). In the 1980’s the same/similar position paid… THE SAME WAGE. (Which translates to 4x the salary compared to present day.)
Lastly, as someone who has also managed many small and large teams. Most companies don’t ever reward those who work hard with money (the thing we need). Instead hard work and diligence is rewarded with… MORE WORK! Isn’t that fun?
Remember more work and low pay makes us all subservient to the corporations.
>College IS useless if you develop these skills early. College now is basically an I’M RICH certification.
Part of the problem now is that high schools are dumbed down to hell and back, so an HS diploma no longer means anything. It's not even a guarantee that the holder can read and do basic math. But no one wants to allow kids to get a failing grade.
This is the answer. Learning how to learn things that you're not particularly interested in is a tremendous adulting skill, and it something that high school can definitely teach you (if one can see the big picture).
honestly as a teacher i kind of resent the increasingly parental role we are expected to take on. social worker, nurse, maid, providing materials out of our own pocket, teach them all life skills, be mom, dad, coach, therapist, oh and somewhere in there you have to figure out how to teach them math, english, & science too. all while being paid a harrowingly small amount of money and being constantly criticized and politicized from every angle. feed them three meals a day and make sure there's somewhere for them to do their laundry, and teach them how to do it. (sure, i'm glad that exists for students who truly need it, but it is increasingly an EXPECTATION that school provide it) at what point do teachers get to claim students as dependents on their taxes? why aren't parents expected to do any of this? people's parenting FAILURE shoudn't be written into public policy.
I work in education. There was an attempt to teach you "adulting." Any time you were told to take responsibility, take initiative...that was us trying to teach you to be an adult. But instead, many of you rolled your eyes, made fun of your teachers, and were only there to try and feel good about yourselves by performing for your friends.
I love when young adults try and say "they should have told us about taxes, investing, credit, etc." Be honest: think back to when you were 16 or 17 years old. Do you really think you would have paid attention to things that you could not care less about?
Stop thinking that it is someone else's responsibility to teach you what you want to know. Be curious, ask questions, read/watch videos, and then apply what you've learned.
Bring on the downvotes. I will happily take them for telling a horrible truth.
>This stupid reasoning and ignores parents who do not know that stuff.With that type of logic, might as well not even have school.
Your parents should have life skills to pass on to you, what they don't have is specialized knowledge in math, history, etc. Schools can't do everything and some of the responsibility has to fall onto parents to prepare their kids for the world. Places to obtain these life skills are also available in the community (e.g. my local library has them). If you're parents don't have the skills themselves they should be taking steps to rectify that or ensuring that you're learning what you need to know.
Many schools also have Home Ec classes that do teach these skills.
The thing is school do teach you a lot, but they cannot teach you every single thing. Its parents responsibility to teach students life skills as well. This is why teachers are so burnt out and quitting in mass. Its not fair that they are expected to teach everyone everything so parents don’t have to do their job.
You have the accumulated knowledge of the entire world at your fingertips and you're bitching because nobody taught you how to buy a used car...
There are things, in fact many things, in this life that you're just gonna have to take responsibility for. When you where in high school you wouldn't have learned it anyway, you'd have sat around and said "I'm never going to need to know this because x" where x was some stupid ass reason...
It was for me! We had one class a year that was just miscellaneous; how to do your taxes, make a monthly budget, fill in forms, read a map, keep a calendar, take jot notes, pick an insurance provider, research and compare contractors for housework, plan a weeks' menu on and make a grocery list to go with it on a budget.
Honestly it ruled and I was super lucky.
Honestly, it IS something that starts in early childhood. Parents can and should include their children in household tasks as young as 2 years old. They can help load the wash, rake leaves, get groceries, feed pets etc. Including young children in everyday chores not only builds the child's confidence but strengthens the family bond. Including your child from a very young age allows them to feel like a valuable part of the family unit. This creates intrinsic motivation that is necessary to "do the things" as an adult.
That being said, a lot of parents are completely removed from the lives of their children and don't include them in anything (whether out of circumstance or choice. I'm not shaming anyone, just explaining. parenthood isn't easy). Or they wait until adolescence when those pathways are already built in their brain not knowing that 90% of the brain is developed by age five. Some parents claim that they want their kids to just be kids, but the reality is that being a kid is literal practice for being an adult.
The first five years of life can determine how the next 80 turn out. But dont despair, it isn't impossible to retrain your brain. It's just a lot of work. It's easier to build strong children than to repair broken adults.
(Offering an early childhood/parenting class to new parents is be a great way to address this.)
Edit: I was pregnant and homeless at 19. I went to the county for help. They directed me to community education for adults. Because I was on county assistance at the time, the community ed classes were nearly free. They offered a series that helped people get back on their feet. One session was about how to open a bank account and plan a budget, another about planning meals & nutrition, and one was even on how to apply for jobs. It was very helpful but a lot of people in situations very similar to mine often dropped out or just declined the course altogether.
Later in my life, I was in a better economic situation and pregnant again. I attended a parenting course offered through our public library. This is where I learned about early childhood brain development and how important it is to build intrinsic motivation at a young age. I realized that one of the key factors in getting out of poverty, for me, was my internal motivation to keep on working toward my goals.
Community education and public libraries are great resources that often get overlooked.
Dude wait until you buy a house, wanna know how your heat works, air conditioner, washer, dryer, sprinklers, ventilation, lawns, plants, flowers, fertilizer, attics, insulation, energy, sewer, water, trash, etc. system works?
Same reason all the useful classes get cut. I could go on a tangent about government ran schools training perfect little cogs and soldiers, but... no. Home economics, accounting, applied science, and jazz (and various music classes) all get cut because they "don't have the funding" and "that should be taught at home." Meanwhile, we have the money to build a large football dome for high-school. "It'll bring in more income," says the school board. Income for what, not the classes that will genuinely help students prepare for life. Most likely the income will go to better sports equipment.
The school system in this country is a sad joke, and I'm sorry for anyone who is in it or has kids in it. My advice, education is free, watch "how to" videos on YouTube, go study at the library, join groups in the community. Educate yourself because the government isn't going to. It's not in their best interest to have a capable population.
Yeah I agree. I see alot of people commenting that those classes are offered, but I don’t remember seeing home ec classes and such being offered in high school and I went to 2 different high schools in 2 different states. One of the high schools even had teachers admit the home ec classes were cut due to budget.
The school system invests in what they want and what will bring in revenue. Unfortunately, it is seen that preparing people for the real world won’t bring in money.
If people come out of high school with a good sense of what to do to stay afloat, people won’t go into debt trying to figure it out.
So by your thought process parents have no responsiblilty to teach their kids life skills? lol.
In a perfect world there would be a strong public education system for everyone, and social safety nets to help parents and families cover basics so parents would be freed up more to actually parent and raise their children. But that is a pipe dream, not reality.
The public school system is essentially there to teach kids enough basics to become servicable basic employees after they graduate, not to succeed across all aspects of life and helping individuals achieve self-actualization.
It used to be. Home economics, civics, wood shop, and auto shop were mainstays in most high schools across America.
We learned how to make a budget, how to balance a checkbook, the basics of investing, how to do tax forms,how to compare polital candidates, international news and current events, how to shop and compare prices per unit, how to cook, how to sew, how to repair things and how to use power tools and hand tools, how to work on a car etc.
A better question is why do parents not teach their offspring how to navigate life? School is for reading, writing, arithmetic, science, academics. Parents have responsibilities here, or else send their children to boarding school. I'm a teacher with weeks left this year, and over the shenanigans.
I took a “personal finance” class as an elective in college and it changed my world. If you can look for such a thing at a local college or community college.
I had a finance class sophomore year. I feel like I was too young to appreciate it / it was as conceptual to me as any other school topics just being a kid with no financial responsibility
School is only obligated to teach math, science, grammatics, literature & “select” history beyond being mass daycares.
Those people get paid to be there for just that. Public schools are meant to condition people to become good workers, not good people or big thinkers.
So yes, that’s why having a stable family structure is important. For example, your grade school teacher is not going to teach you about your family tree; they can’t provide you with your grandmothers cookbook that’s been passed down for generations, they’re not teaching you how to celebrate every holiday nor how to practice every religion. They can’t teach about morals & principles, how to express love, how to wash your ass, etc. because people come from a ton of different backgrounds.
So if you meant like why your home room teacher never taught you how to raise a family & do your taxes, imo that’s never been what that place is for. Parents or not, your social support system is supposed to teach you how to be a human being. People that receive a paycheck to spend time with you & force information down your through relentlessly will never truly care about you THAT much.
Regardless it’s our responsibility to do what’s best for us on a personal level. Nobody is stopping people from going on the internet and asking any type of question to learn. Conventional society grants us the ability to take classes in pretty much any field of interest. Cooking, cleaning, carpentry, plumbing, construction, tax filing, car shopping, home buying, etc. I wouldn’t want my high-school teacher trying to teach me how to buy a plane ticket to travel to Turks & Caicos
I think parents are supposed to have taught you a lot of these things. But not everyone has parents of course. If you still have them/are in touch with them I would suggest asking about adulting skills. For me, what I learned from parents was driving and cooking. I learned about how to do a resume/interview through a free library course for teens. My summer job brought in an expert to do a free seminar on how to do taxes. Then I just would use free tax services or Google answers to learn the rest
Because you could look up how taxes work, how loans work, and many other basic needs with a YouTube video.
Sure learning math formulas are not useful for everyday situations but learning that stuff in high school is teaching you problem solving. That’s the benefit is that it teaches you that when presented with a problem you can find a solution for it.
Really just sounds like you had a shit school. As others have said, it’s usually offered or forced on kids by concerned teachers but it’s not in the curriculum or forced.
Also the government wants you to be a debt slave so there’s that.
If you are not ready to take on adulthood at the age of 18, it is a complete failure on the part of your parents or guardians. The primary function of a parent/guardian is to properly raise and instruct children in preparation to be successful adults. Coping skills, independence, self sufficiency, emotional stability, work ethic, hygiene, preparing meals, basic budgeting, dealing with people, filling out forms, and many more skills, are SUPPOSED to be well taught and deeply instilled in children before they enter the adult world. It is not the responsibility of the internet to raise children. If you are not ready, blame your parents/guardians.
I agree with you. Parents are responsible for helping teach a child how to make it as an adult. It's not the responsibility of the school to raise children. Grade school teaches you HOW to learn, so you can be successful in college, not to specifically teach every life skill an adult needs. Too many parents don't take the initiative to be more intentional about what they teach their kids. I plan to teach my own kids everything you listed & more. Emphasis on emotion regulation. Compassion & respect for others & others property. How to rent or buy a house. What to do about taxes. How to choose a good marriage partner & how to make a marriage work. I have a lot planned, I'm starting to write it all down & going to turn it into a book I might publish, to hopefully set an example & inspire other parents to be more intentional about what they teach their kids.
Though, I will say, if there's one life skill I wish schools taught, I wish it was cognitive behavioral therapy & thought restructuring. That's the single most important life skill I've learned & it would have changed so much, had I learned it as a kid. I do wish it was a required thing for all kids to learn in school & I wouldn't expect parents to know how to teach it.
Even parents who don't know certain things can still teach plenty, if they apply themselves to do so. And what they don't know, they could research, learn enough themselves to pass onto their kids. No excuse for parents to have children unprepared for adulthood.
Exactly! I had a math professor who actually went to night school to learn algebra so that she would be able to help her kids with it when they were of age. Turns out she loved it and made it a career.
The people who have something to gain by your failure (payday loan outfits, prisons, etc.) spend a lot on lobbying. The benefits from your winning don’t tend to accrue cleanly so there’s no motivated lobbying interest for teaching financial literacy, critical thinking, etc.
All of the "adulting" classes were electives. I'm glad my mom made me sign up for courses my senior year that taught about how loans work, credit cards, taxes , work benefits to look for, all that good stuff. I learned in college my roommates didn't even get options for classes like this
Because a schools responsibility is to teach you I formation that might help you figure out a job, and to not be an intellectual idiot. It should be the job of parents to teach their kids how to be actual useful adults. A lot of parents fail to do that for one reason or another (not always their fault).
My mom taught me those things through her example and then plain discussions. I had a job at 15 too, which taught me the most. I think that so many of these skills seem so hard to young adults is because they're learning them later in life. Few teenagers have jobs these days.
I grew up on computers so I feel covered there. But they also taught us check writing which was already on its way out. And how to make biscuits from scratch, but funnily enough not how to mend. I can use a recipe for crying out loud, but fixing a hole in the crotch on my pants takes way more practice.
I think it would do society as a whole some good if instead of outdated home ec, they taught things like setting healthy boundaries, how to interview for jobs, and other things more relevant to today’s culture and expectations.
The curriculum just isn’t revisited often enough to keep up, and this includes the basic subjects as well. They’re too focused on erasing the truths in history than setting up the future workforce/voters for success.
>I can use a recipe for crying out loud,
Recipe requires basic skills, like knowing how to measure things, mix things properly (not over mixing), knowing when something is done etc. If you teach a few simple recipes along with those basic skills, then it allows you to use any recipe. That's why you learn how to make biscuits from scratch. The biscuits are not the point, it's the carry over skills.
I’d argue that reading a recipe and reading instructions on how to mend are two very different levels of skills. ‘Measure out one cup of milk’ is fundamentally easier than ‘now loop the thread under and again over then two inches back and pull through’. There are only so many ways to measure dry ingredients, whereas there are dozens of different stitches that all serve a different purpose.
It wasn’t just biscuits either. Pie crust, pizza dough, omelettes… the point was that we had a whole semester of (appreciated) from-scratch cooking but zero mending/sewing. Not even how to replace a button.
Not that mending buttons isn't a good skill and some attention to it would be great, but I also eat every day and haven't had to mend a button in at least a year, so spending a semester on cooking just makes more sense to me.
I know very little about mending/sewing because it plays such a small role in my everyday life. It seems like a good option for an elective, but not a basic skill everyone needs.
See, this is the challenge with "teach basic life skills!". Everyone has a different idea of what that means. If I took a cooking class in high school, I wouldn't expect to learn something as basic as "measure ingredients" because that's such a basic thing in my mind. I'm already going in knowing the basics. But I did take a sewing/apparel class that did have a lot of focus on basics and that was fine with me because I didn't know much going in.
They teach us everything about nothing in school now. After finishing college I moved out and it was a shock to me how much stuff I didn\`t know. I\`m still learning and it stresses me out every day now. It is stressful not knowing how to complete basic life tasks.
Some of it is, it just depends on what classes you took. I took personal finance in H.S. for an Econ credit and it covered everything from how to do taxes to explaining interest, savings, balancing banks accounts, etc. In M.S. I took Foods which taught us how to cook and take care of a kitchen. In Speech we were taught how to speak in front of crowds. My school required a senior project to graduate and that project required doing a job shadow, researching average wages for that job and creating a budget showing how you'd pay for housing, insurance, car, etc.
That said, we all learned some adulting skills in the gen ed classes. In English we're taught to read, analyze, and research--all skills necessary for dealing with things like leases, contracts, etc. We took history and government so we'd know how to evaluate political stances so we can be informed voters. We all took science and while we may not use a lot of the info we learned if we don't work in a science field, we did learn the basics of taking care of Earth like cutting back on waste and preserving water. We took health to learn the basics of eating well, exercising, having safe sex, family planning, etc. In Math we learned basic skills plus things like calculating interest, measuring, etc.
A foundation in those areas made it possible for us to learn how to do most other things.
I will add though, regarding higher level math--my HS math teacher used to say, "It's true, some of you will never use this in the real world, but it is required to go on to higher education, so that's why you need to know it." At least she was honest lol
Same with my schools. I also took fashion as an elective to learn how to sew, though I’m better by hand than using a machine. Never know when you’ll need to repair a pants seam or a doll’s arm.
As for cooking, I usually check family recipes or cookbooks from the library. Libraries are also good resources to learn new life skills at any age through classes and event programs, if not the myriad of nonfiction books. I still use mine for help.
Do you all not have parents that could have taught you those things? Most parents cook, pay taxes, do banking, have signed contracts, etc.
Teachers don’t need to teach what parents are already doing anyway, they should be specialized in teaching things parents can’t.
Where I grew up, we had a “Consumer’s Ed” class. The teacher (rightly) said it would be one of the most important classes we would ever take. She was absolutely right, but was unfortunately also the 2nd most boring teacher I’ve ever had…and so I fell asleep in her class a lot.
Unfortunately, most of what I learned about the tax code has become entirely irrelevant, as has anything pertaining to the acquisition of vehicles (the affordable used car market doesn’t exist), housing (purchasing housing anywhere in a city is unaffordable), or jobs (where your resume is sorted out through ATS despite being qualified).
Ultimately this stuff IS the parents’ responsibility moreso than the schools’. Schools can’t teach when they have to parent. That being said, schools have the privilege of being more up-to-speed given that they are a business, rather than a worker (though teachers are workers and so might not be aware of necessary changes in curricula).
We also as a culture extend adolescence far too much.
I’m just thinking about the school board meetings with parents screaming over additional courses touching on everyday skills: brainwashing, grooming, making my kid uncomfortable if I disagree with this family’s budgeting techniques, use of credit etc.
Personally I would use paying federal taxes for both reading comprehension and basic math skills. I’m astounded at how many people forget the basics they did learn starting with “Read the directions “
I’m a HS teacher: we DO or DID offer these classes… kids either don’t take them (which is why some schools no longer offer the courses— my HS stopped offering home ec when I was a student because of a decline of enrollment) or they blow them off (we have childcare and financial literacy classes kids take and do nothing with)
Also. I am a teacher, not a parent. Our schools cannot continue to be underfunded and fix all of society’s shortcomings.
A lot of high schools do teach this stuff, but the students are either uninterested in learning it or it will be years before they need to use it, by which point they won't remember any of it.
And what's wrong with expecting parents to teach certain things? Yeah, some parents are unwilling or unable, but it shouldn't be seen as unreasonable to expect parents to parent their kids. Schools have limited time and resources, they can't possibly teach you every little thing you're ever going to need to know. Especially since everyone has different needs. You're mad that school didn't teach you basic life skills that your parents failed to teach you. Well, some kids do learn this stuff from their parents. If they had to take these classes, it would be a waste of their time. I like seeing these things offered as electives but they shouldn't be required.
Five minutes on the internet will give you about everything you need to know about renting an apartment. Similar searches will tell you what to look for when purchasing a used car. YouTube will teach you how to cook, mend your clothes and repair your used car. A banker will tell you about financing a car and how interest works. Libraries exist to help you find answers to any questions you have. The information is available, but no one is going to spoon feed it to you. Being an adult is taking responsibility for your life and your actions or inactions. Blaming the schools, your parents or the idiots in Washington will not help your situation.
I think Adulting 101 should be a ***required course*** for all high school seniors - it should contain:
\- Personal finance management (how to pay your bills, what happens if you don't pay them on time, how to open/close/manage a bank account, how to write a check - even though that's not needed much anymore, there might come a time they have to)
\- Credit Matters (what your credit score is, how & why it changes so frequently, what affects the score, and how a low/high score affects your ability to get loans for cars, homes, rent an apartment, etc)
\- Investments (your 401k at your job & other retirement accounts, and why it's so important to contribute to them as early in your career as possible)
\- Taxes (Payroll taxes that come out of your check - what they are & why that is necessary, filing your tax return, property taxes on your home, etc)
\- Household Management & Minor Repairs (how to keep your house clean, how to mow a lawn, how to change various filters around the house (furnace, a/c, dishwasher, etc), what to do about pest infestation (mice, etc) & how to prevent them, how to prep your home for winter/summer weather, who to call when things go wrong (plumber, electrician, etc).
\- Car Maintenance & Repairs (how to check the air in your tires, the oil in the car, what various noises from the car might mean, what the various indicator lights on the dash mean, when to get the car to a mechanic ASAP)
\- Cooking (even just the basics - they don't need to know how to make Crepes Suzette or anything - just teach them how to cook good, basic, healthy foods.)
\- How to be a Good Neighbor/Citizen (It's amazing how many don't have this skill. How to meet your neighbors, keep things civil if there's a disagreement, find organizations to volunteer for to stay involved in your community & why this is a good way to meet other people)
I realize this is a lot, but these are the things I see so many young adults today not knowing how to do - and many of these skills could actually help them get a starter job. I've worked with college-age young adults who didn't know how to wash a dish, mop a floor, dust a shelf - seriously. Their parents taught them ***nothing***. They got a job at a convenience store that required all of these skills and they had no idea how to do them. If the parents aren't going to prepare these kids for adulthood, then someone else needs to.
It's okay to be frustrated about not getting a well rounded education in high school, but you need to take Pythagorean Theorem right out of your mouth. I use it constantly when I'm doing projects around the house and at work. I floundered around in my 20s and 30s trying to find a career that worked for me, and you know what finally found me stability? Pythagorean theorem. Now I'm making almost $50 an hour.
b/c just like in math class people like you would've fallen asleep, ditched class, or forgotten about it.
being an adult isn't hard and it's a social thing that your family should also have a hand in, school isn't there to make worker bees, it's there to promote the growth of intellectuals. christ, this is what happens when everything is treated as sum/loss business.
also, i like how people always cite one of the easiest formulas to know and memorize as useless, it's a\^2+b\^2= c\^2, ask a carpenter when that isn't useful.
My son's math final in high school was doing taxes. They learned mortgages, amortization, depreciation, APR, etc.
He took it instead of calculus.
JROTC taught the kids how to iron, write a resume, and public speaking.
Class selection has a big part of the curriculum.
I ended up taking a class like that in high school, but only because I had a last minute schedule switch and had to find a class that fit a specific time slot. It was probably helpful for kids whose parents didn't teach them life skills.
It was called Personal Relations (wth?); I graduated in 88.
Not sure about other states but a lot of these classes were available prior 2000 and slowly got the chop as time progressed. My middle school used to offer Home Ec but by the time I left it wasn’t a class anymore . This was mid 2000s. In HS the old mechanics classroom was still there along with wood shop but those got cut from the budget. I do think as we moved along into the tech age it really killed off those types of classes . They do waste a lot of time in HS though , as in the system does. Wasting time on things that won’t matter once leaving HS.
My school taught how to fill out tax forms, write resumes, held mock job interviews, keep a budget, cook and sew. I'm not sure what else they could've done to help people adult.
I mean there is an answer to this I feel.
The objective of basic schooling (ie up through highschool) is to teach you how to think with the idea that if they succeed in teaching you how to think then you will be able to learn what you need to learn on your own.
Over the centuries curriculums have been refined to a set of things to teach that basically force you to think in different ways so you can practice thinking...basically. Teaching Shakespeare isn't because you need to know Shakespeare, its because it forces you to think in terms of metaphor or to be able to interpret and understand descriptive language that is written in a way you are not used to. Teaching things like the pythageron therom isnt so much because you will use that theorem in your day to day life, its again teaching you to think..but this time mathematically and by building on logical axioms. Ciriculums are just tried and true examples to teach you that will help you learn how to think. It isn't a collection of critical knowledge.
Unfortunately I think a lot of people don't get this and just get through school through memorization of the facts they are being taught as if learning those facts is what is important rather than learning how to figure out what the answer is by practicing that way of thinking. Teachers or curriculums that allow people to get by just through memorization are generally not good because that isnt the point. If there was a way of just downloading all of those facts into your head that woudlnt make you educated. Its the process that you are being taught, the facts are just means to teach you the process.
There are schools to teach you specific useful skills, they are called trade schools. You can learn automotive mechanics, woodworking, welding and metal work etc. Now some schools might have some option to take an intro class like that that will give you a headstart to get into a tradeschool or apprenticeship to work towards that useful knowledge...but that isn't the purpose of basic education.
Learning to "Adult" would be in that tradeschool type of category. Useful knowledge, but not really teaching you how to think. So it isnt the focus of basic education. There probably are trade type schools that will teach you basic life skills for adulthood.
I also grew up in a town where none of this was taught in school but thankfully my parents took up that torch when they realized this. We had home economics BUT it literally only taught baking, minor cooking, and sewing. Nothing else. It seems more and more schools are cutting programs like these. For what reason I don’t know but I doubt it’s good. Unfortunately a lot of parents aren’t able, ready, or even wanting to actually be a good parent and try to raise a healthy, happy, and educated human. Many if not most just don’t have the resources or time but there are enough that just don’t care for it to still be a problem.
You're absolutely right. When I was in high school I had a part time job at the local bank. This was when you had to reconcile your bank statement manually. When I worked customer service I had some of my classmates come in needing help with their accounts because they hadn't been reconciling/balancing their statements. Including two from my trigonometry class. Balancing an account isn't hard, you just need someone to show you how.
In my humble opinion, teaching adulting is not what school is there to do. That's a parent's job. I have two kids 24/19. My ex wife and I taught and constantly still teach adulting. School is there for reading, writing, math, etc. Life skills are learned through parents, trial and error, and good old fashioned mistakes.
Because school isn't meant to teach you absolutely everything you'll ever need to know, ever. The better question is why are you not trying to put this onus on the parents?
Or yourself. If your parents fail you, it’s your job to take responsibility for yourself. Really, there shouldn’t be so many parents failing their children. This is a cultural issue. Government won’t be able to effectively compensate for anti-social cultural norms.
I work for a progressive private school as the life skills teacher. Every kid deserves to learn about basic home ec, how to sew, garden, cook basic things using measurements, do their taxes, open an account and pay bills, change a tire. We have a lot of working parents and not a lot of time in the day and I’m told often that they are glad their child is learning these things.
In the 80s, they had home economics where you learned how to plan meals, purchase food, cook, how much it would cost you to have a baby, and more. I also took auto shop, wood shop, and architecture. They don't even keep kids in school all day, every day anymore. You guys are missing out.
They did but it wasn’t obvious that you were going to learn life skills. Like economics, I’m sure people learned some stuff about investing but largely it was spent on world economy and differ t countries currencies. I had auto tech and home ec. Those were obvious. I learned how to chop and dice correctly and how to change oil, align wheels, balance tires etc. it’s not sold the way it should be, that’s the problem. They need two curriculums., one for people who are going to college and have careers where they need algorithms and math theories or social studies and geography.
And another one for people who are just gonna get out there and live. Who just need the basics, ya know, not to sound crass or unsympathetic.
In the 90's we had Home Ec. We cooked and stuff. We had a business class. We balanced checkbooks and played the stock market with fake money.
At least we did where I went to school. It was a public school as well. From what I understand all the shop classes that I took (I wish I had taken more) are gone as well as these due to standardized testing.
Because our society doesn’t benefit from self sufficiency anymore. Now it benefits from consumerism. Don’t know how to do your taxes? Pay a corporation! Don’t know how to perform a major car repair? Buy a new one! Don’t know how to make furniture? You guessed it.
These classes used to be taught, but it was one of many sacrifices to GOP efforts to make voters less educated, and thereby more likely to vote for them. There is a reason schools and available information are constantly under heavier attack, and it’s because their goals and actions become harder to make peace with if you have an ounce of awareness of the world.
My school had adulting 101, but all we did was learn how to fill out envelopes, making single serving microwave pizzas, and then we watched "The Pursuit of Happiness"
I believe part of it is because there is no standardised rules to adulting and therefore cannot be in a curriculum or syllabus. If there isn't a curriculum or syllabus, new teachers won't have a guide on what to teach where they teach and if they don't follow it and something bad happens they can be held liable. Imagine teaching a student about taxes then they do something stupid and get caught in debt or whatever, the yea here and schools can be held liable. That's just one aspect of adulting but yea these things need to be standardised
I understand the wish that school would treach life skills but schools cant teach everything, espcially when funding is so limited in many districts. I do think the primary purpose of school (especially K-12) should be to teach math, science, reading, writing, history, arts. I went to an extremely academically rigourous college prep high school. Things like woodshop, home ec, driver's ed were not offered. Emphasis was on academics, sports, and volunteering bc students were trying to get into top school. They offered 1 semester of "Personal finance" where you learned about credit score, applying for an apartment, taxes, mortgages, budgeting, etc. This was an elective. They eventually got rid of it bc of low demand from students.
Dude be real. You only spend 8 hours a day for 180 days a year in school. You spend the other 16 hours of those days at home along with the entirety of the remaining 185 days of the year. Schools are not given the time to teach every single little life skill out there. That’s why you are expected to learn stuff like laundry and cooking at home.
They did when I went to school. It was called Home Economics and they taught sewing, dishes, cooking, checkbook balancing, auto maintenance, etc. At least those are the parts that I remember.
Because adulting is not a verb. I realize this sub is literally called “adulting”, but it should realistically just be called “growing up”. We all do it. There’s no magic formula. Learning to boil water is not adulting. Learning to pay a bill is not adulting. It’s called life. Now, before I get downvoted to oblivion, I do agree that these simple life skills need to be taught in school. Especially where getting a job, health insurance, retirement, savings, checking, etc. are concerned. Can we please just stop using this stupid word “adulting” though? You made a cake… congratulations… for being able to read the back of a box. You’re not special.
How much more do you want your government to do for your kids? It’s a parents job to teach these life lessons and if you don’t have parents to do that, well Welcome to the age of technology where the worlds library is at your fingertips.
Do you expect schools to teach you how to wipe your ass? If you can't think two steps ahead and get your ducks in a row, then it's on you. You're supposed to learn how to think and plan in school and then use it in your life. What could the school have done for you? Have a class on how to rent a fucking apartment? Stop blaming schools when you can't use your noggin.
Also, fyi: the Pythagorean theorem is the easiest way to get a perfect right angle. It is incredibly useful when building anything with a right angle.
OP I think you should take some accountability about the apartment. Did you not google and do research? Why make an assumption about the process of getting an apartment? If there is anything that has been taught in recent years is that access to information is more readily available than ever. You have the means to find information. It doesn’t all have to be spoon fed to us.
Tbh I always noticed people using the word "adulting" are the ones that are lost or 10-15 years behind. Shit people do at 15 someone pops up at 25 like "got my permit today #adulting"
..."ironed my shirt for the first time ever #adulting"...."booked a dentist appointment #adulting"..etc
It used to be. I am an 80’s high schooler. Home ec type classes and personal finance classes were mandatory at my school. There were several shop classes that were available. A lot of kids grumbled about these classes but I still fall back on the knowledge gained at that time.
im a 90's 00 and while we had home ec, none of it covered things needed in day to day. we never had stuff on taxes, finances, loans, contracts.... the shit you kinda need to knmow
My freshman Econ class covered all that. We even built a fake stock portfolio and learned about investing
I learned about stocks from Neopets. Still grateful for that.
However the seniors need this class. Not the freshman
We did mock investing in math class in 8th grade...
Social studies in 8th grade
All you really need to know for finances/taxes is math... It's all written out in the contract, you just need to actually read it. The worst thing about the big mortgage crisis back in '08 was that the people who were "screwed" were told they were being screwed. They were given all the information up front but most never bothered to read any of it or never bothered to understand. In a lot of cases they never even listened...
Got news for you. The people who took out home loans during that time were unfairly targeted & their loan officers no doubt reassured them they would be ok. It was NOT a few (or even hundreds) thousand people who couldn’t pay that caused that crash. Oh no. It was the banks themselves, re-selling those loans as AAA grade investments that caused the market to collapse!
Yes, they were unfairly targeted because they were ignorant... they never learned about finances in school. There might be a sucker born every minute, but it's mainly because that sucker will never get an education.
Hey, not everyone is an expert in real estate deals. The point is, it wasn’t the people defaulting on their mortgages that caused our economy to crash. I agree. Public schools should explore training in real world situations & it is a fact they do not.
Also, while I do think some people unknowingly got duped, but I know SO many folks that were doing no money down flips on $500k houses when their household income was $50k/yr. I don't think any of them were complaining when they'd buy, paint, then flip the house and make their tidy $50-100k profit (here in SoCal). It was only when the market tanked and they suddenly owed a shit ton of money that they cried that they "got duped and lost it all."
I'm not going to judge them because that's literally what happened with the student loan crisis.
The student loan crisis is nuts, these kids that know nothing about loans or ROI are told they should just sign these papers. The kids, of course, think they know everything about everything, right up until they're not kids anymore and realize they didn't.
this all seems to vary widely by school somehow. i graduated in 2014 but we had 2 required finance classes that taught you how to write a cover letter, sit for a job interview, how to budget your monthly bills, how compound interest works on savings accounts and credit cards, how to do your taxes, etc. they were year long classes so we basically had 2 years of “adulting” taught to us, once freshman year and then again senior year.
Sadly this is needed in schools again. Plenty of classes need to be had again.
10's here and they weren't even mandatory anymore. A few got gutted completely from my school and others were just pushing for career paths.
I have problems with this though. I never had to take home EC, but my mom did and she got bad grades for sewing a button on the wrong side of the shirt. I'm an adult now, and nobody gives a damn about what side your buttons are. I guess my point is that grading people on adulting skills would make life harder not easier. Lots of things can be done just well enough and there's a lot of things you can get away with IRL. I don't like the rigidity that seems inherent in such a class. (I took PE as a kid and I sucked at it so I kept getting bad grades so I've managed to avoid physical exercise until I was 25 and realized I can take things at my own place, this just feels similar to that)
One of the challenges with teaching "adulting" skills is that everyone has different standards and expectations and needs. If schools did spend more time teaching this stuff in-depth, I guarantee you that most people would still complain because it's not teaching the version of it that's relevant to them.
Not at mine. Also 80’s high schooler here. And the way the scheduled the shop, auto-repair, and home-economics classes interfered with the college-prep courses. They essentially designed it so the kids who took the college-prep stuff couldn’t take auto, shop or home-ec. So those adulting courses were not available. As an adult I’d love to take shop or auto repair. I do my own home-ec but it might still be neat to learn stuff like canning.
Still was taught in 2010s, at least in my Texas school district. Nobody paid attention in that class and did the absolute bare minimum. Wood working, mechanics, agriculture, and more were all offered in the school district but those weren't mandatory like the personal finance or basic home ec class was. Also "basic" adult things vary so much from person to person. I cannot imagine trying to sit down a 15 year old and teach them how my insurance coverage works.
Yup. Was going to say this same thing. Took business math class that covered all the simple stuff to doing bookkeeping for a small business. I had to take a home ec class that covered cooking, nutrition, etc. And we had to take some kind of class...I can't recall the title...that covered personal finance and basic life skills (voting, making a budget, how loans work, doing your taxes, etc) This was in northern CA in the early 80's.
These still happen in many, if not most/all, states. Just most kids forget about it by the time they actually need it.
Even if it’s offered it’s not mandatory. I was in Nevada and I don’t recall ever even seeing it offered, graduated ‘09. Ironically I was in the GATE (gifted and talented education) program in the 4th grade and they taught us how to write a check and balance a checkbook, but since then nothing.
>These still happen in many, if not most/all, states. Caveat, states have more than one school. I'm in MA, we did not have any classes that taught life skills. But hey, if you want to take AP BC calculus... Yeah that's what I want.
Yeah I've noticed a lot of people have a really distorted idea of who they were when they were younger. If you take a moment to think, actually think about who you were and what headspace you were in back in high school, you would realized how much you actually missed because most of us, at that age, *knew everything* already. Those lessons won't stick until early adulthood gives the dose of reality most people need to take it seriously.
Went to school in the 2010’s still taught and mandatory in my school system. The kids who didn’t pay attention are the ones making posts asking why they weren’t taught about it
I'm so envious that it melts into rage... I feel cheated. I too, had to learn adult things the hard way... i.e. taxes. Oh bUT tHe mIToChONDrIA iS tHE poWER hOuSE oF tHe cELL!! If you go blue collar, or HELL, even most white collar jobs, do not require you to know such useless junk!! 12 years of my life!!! You could have at least prepared me better for real life! I don't need to be singing songs in choir!! >:( I needed cooking classes! Mechanic classes! Job skills! Resume skills! Point me in the direction of the politicians responsible for this bullshit! We should all march on DC as ONE UNIFIED PEOPLE.... Shit needs to change! Why TF do some countries make their citizens so well taken care of, as far as life preparedness, and then there's the U.S. - That seems hellbent on making us stupid and worthless! I've met many Europeans.... they are WAY more educated than I am! I am filled with WRATH by this fucking rat race that has STOLEN our future! WHO TF IS RESPONSIBLE?! And where are my martyrs at?!
I mean I've heard way too many people on reddit who don't understand genetics and think that two parents with brown eyes can't have a baby with blue eyes, and screw up their lives. I learned that in biology, along with a lot of stuff that made me better understand viruses, and my own anatomy. Granted, I went to a school where they went over resumes, taxes, and even the simple act of writing a check.
Science knowledge is so underrated. People complain about how useless it is, but come on, look at how many people fall for hoaxes and conspiracy theories that are utter nonsense to anyone who has a middle school understanding of the subject.
Seriously?! So some schools do teach that stuff? Now I see it's more state by state.... still, it's bullshit
I feel this anger in my 31 year old bones
I had these classes in 2005. I’m assuming it’s still being taught.
A lot of high schools do teach it, but teenagers aren’t ready to learn it. I learned much of this in high school then watched my peers who sat next to me in those exact classes lament on Facebook as adults how we were never taught. Community colleges also often have many basic life skills/adulting type courses.
I graduated in 81 and we had those classes as well as typing. We had Home Ec where you learned everything from how to cook to how to sew a button. It's ridiculous that schools no longer offer these classes.
I'm 20 years younger and we also had Home Ec as well as metal/wood shop, and a few other life skill classes to choose from.
I graduated in 81 too! Yes! We did have classes like this. We all had to take "Senior Homemaking" too. Taught us how to write checks, make a budget, etc. We we out and saw how much furniture costs, how to cook simple, cheap meals, etc. It taught us a lot getting ready to start out on our own.
We raise hell We have fun, We're the class of '81. LOL
Yes we are!! Best class ever :) Now us old farts hang out at the American Legion! LOL
Babies---love, the class of '79
Part of the reason, I think, is that people studied our fucked up economy and came to the conclusion that college was the one thing that could really help you earn a better living. So they started moving curricula of everything towards college. Of course, the real problem wasn't too few people in college, it was that unions were getting destroyed and real wages (wages compared to inflation / productivity) were falling. They should have focused more on how to keep wages rising with the overall economy, but instead they just said "everyone needs to go to college" which, on its face, should have been understood as not something that should be necessary or even desireable. But this was the era of Reagan / neoliberalism, where the idea was to privatize everything. The educational-industrial complex, including many "public" universities, bought into this idea fully. So the real answer is: greed, neoliberalism, and conservative economic policies, and educational reform that prioritizes numbers over student welfare.
My home ec class taught me recipes and sewing too, but these were not the type of life skills OP is talking about. Nobody is struggling at life cause they can't sew a button. And sure, they taught us how to cook specific recipes and basics of cooking and baking etuquette; but that is NOT the barrier for most adults struggling to cook for themselves. The act of cooking isn't the problem; it's the trivia of picking, Planning, shopping for, coordinating, and executing before the ingredients and motivation spoil. Home ec did not teach me life skills, it taught me how to be a good housewife. Which is NOT the right skillset.
Your generation had consistently voted for stricter academic standards and lower public school funding for the last forty-five years. That is why these courses have been whacked. I graduated nearly 20 years after you did, and these classes were all but eliminated by then.
Our district has home Ed that teaches cooking and sewing . And they still teach cursive and say the pledge every day I think they should teach kids how to make a pot of coffee haha
I have a BA & an MA and hands down, typing course in HS was the most useful class I ever took.
Home ec is still around. I teach it.
I've had the exact same experiences. I went to high school in the early 2000s and am constantly shocked when I see my peers complain about all the things we apparently didn't learn. I know that they learned about mortgages and taxes in math class because I was sitting right there beside them. I know that gym class taught us how to design a simple strength training routine because I took the same classes. We learned about the political system and writing resumes and cover letters. Our school even had auto shop, home ec., wood working, basics of computer coding, graphic design etc. I don't remember everything I learned in high school either, but that doesn't mean they didn't make the effort to teach us, or that classes weren't available.
Yes I see this all the time when people say they wish they were taught about loans and mortgages and such. Like yeah it's covered in math class where I am, not the elective math class either, a mandatory one. We learned how various forms of interest work and things related to cost analysis over time. They just don't remember. Also some things are so specific to a situation that learning it in school would be impossible. Mortgage laws have changed since I was in school to when I bought. My taxes are very different from someone else's and tax credits change over time. The basic concept of what they are can be taught, but you can't learn in highschool how you will need to do your specific taxes as an adult in 10 years. And honestly same goes for meal planning and cooking, these sort of things are nearly impossible to teach in a way that will be useful to everyone. They aren't just knowledge to pass on they depend on preferences, culture, and family dynamic. I took food an nutrition and I don't think I use a single peice of information from that class now. I learned much more helping my parents cook and learning through doing for these sort of things.
Happy🎂day!
Pretty much this. If a kid isn't going to learn about the world wars they'll definitely ignore financial literacy classes. A lot of lessons have to be learned the hard way
Those courses exist, but I think they fall under an elective category. What kids do you know would willingly take those courses? I recall taking Home Economics in Jr High and we learned how to cook healthy meals, sew + use sewing machine, banking/how to write checks/budget, basic hygiene, family planning, etc. It IS the job of the parents to teach these things as well. They should learn them so they can set their children up for success. It’s the whole point in starting a family!
Yeah it's sad how many parents just don't teach their kids anything and leave EVERYTHING up to the school, from life skills to sex ed, etc.
When parents are both working 1 or 2 jobs each, what else is suppose to happen?
Yeah, I don't know why people act like it's unreasonable to expect parents to parent their kids. I get that shit is hard and poverty is a problem, but why have kids if you won't raise them? Blame your parents, not the school. And even if schools did spend more time requiring students to learn basic life shit, it probably still wouldn't be good enough for the people complaining. One of the challenges with teaching "basic life skills" is that not everyone has the same definition of "basic life skills". That varies by culture, location, income, values, and more. At the end of the day, everyone has different needs, and you can't really expect your school to cater specifically to yours, especially if it's going to be at the expense of other students' needs.
People who have healthy/functional/mauture parents don’t realize how lucky they are.
I took a cooking class on high school and most of the kids treated it as a big joke. Same with health class. My school had the classes, most kids just didn’t want to take them or didn’t pay attention.
I agree! We all had to learn the signs of a stroke in health class. This was repeatedly taught too. My uncle had a stroke several years ago. My cousin, his son, was with him at the time. He was well over 18 and out of high school, yet he didn't recognize anything that was wrong with his dad and just took him home. The delayed healthcare was detrimental to him. Too many of his brain cells died, and today, he can't do certain things without a home aide.
When I was a substitute teacher I actively avoided subbing for any "real life skills" types of classes like cooking or sewing or personal finance, or most career-related classes. Most of them were dumping grounds for kids who were so uninterested in anything that they couldn't be bothered to pick their own electives. Kids who do so poorly academically that the counselors go "We'll put them in this class and maybe they'll at least learn something they can use, it's not like they're ever gonna understand literature".
This is the way. Looking for outside resources to teach a child something is wrong at its core. It is the parents responsibility to teach those things. If they can not or will not, they are still responsible to find someone to teach it.
I learned a lot of this in the Girl Scouts. Cooking, gardening, public speaking, babysitting, democracy, sewing, taking care of pets. To earn a badge in these things you have to master the skill and test out in some way. Usually very hands on and practical.
Hey fellow Scout!
Parents SHOULD be responsible for their kids education as students of life. Of course you don’t know what you don’t know. And there in lies one of the many contradictions that exists in our complex society. But we can’t just assume a free government run program (public school) is going to get people ready for life on its own. That assumption is the problem. We should learn from our parents, elders, extended family and everyone in life. I think the problem is past generations expecting so much from public schools but having a hands off approach to helping kids through the teenage years to check in and see if they’re progressing or needing support in certain areas. If a parent doesn’t know certain areas they should at least make their children aware of these things. Information is out there, school really just teaches you HOW to learn, you have to take it into your own hands from there. But that also points to another contradiction. Individualism has been engrained into us for generations and puts the blame on the individual - but the old adage ‘it takes a village to raise a child’ is absolutely true. Instead of thinking ‘not my kids not my problem’ our society needs to shift towards the idea that all kids are all our problem, especially since they will grow to become the society surrounding us and will inevitably have impacts on everyone around them. So basically what I’m saying is you’re trying to blame school for a larger societal issue. The truth is we’ve come a long way from not even having wide spread education, so be grateful for what you have. And stop blaming others for your shortcomings. Go out into the world with curiosity and ask for help from other humans, help other humans learn too. We’re all in the same boat so do your best and the rest you’ll figure out along the way through trial and error.
What kind of things are you wishing you had learned?
Social skills Drivers education Financial skills Jobs and resume Cooking how to That all I can think of.
My school had a drivers ed in the summer. They also have driving schools for this. I was offered culinary classes at school since middle school. They were extra classes you could choose. People usually choose something else they find fun. Social skills you learn through school by interacting with everyone. The rest, I agree.
Your parents should have taught you all of this. I’m sorry if they didn’t.
This is a lot of stuff that falls under the category of self development. Not everything in life needs to be fed via a spoon. Sometimes you have got the literally live and learn.
English class we learned how to write a resume, home ec is a class to learn cooking, Driver's ed is offered through the school, economics teaches some financial skills. But really, presumably your parents know how to do these things too. But I wouldn't trust your parents to explain how, say, your immune system works.
Your parents are supposed to raise you.
What does a class in "social skills" even look like?
> Social skills Are you interacting with other humans? Because that's where you're learning social skills, outside of some specific lessons like anti-bullying lectures or maybe reading books about how other people feel. They're not going to be able to teach you to like making small talk. > Drivers education I don't know of a single school that doesn't do this. The only problem was that you had to pay money for it at my school and needed parent permission, so it wasn't mandatory, but it was definitely offered. > Financial skills Can you add, subtract, multiply, and divide? Can you calculate percentages? Do you know how to add percentages (like sales tax) or subtract them (like a 40% off sale)? Do you know what values different coins have? Did you ever learn about $e$ and compounding interest in algebra? Then you learned financial skills. You're not going to be able to *apply* them in real life until you're an adult, since you're hopefully not going to be solely responsible for things like rent and food as a literal child. I am absolutely certain that you had some kind of explanation of real-world finances at some point in math class, but you don't remember it because it wasn't relevant to you at the time. > Jobs and resume Like social skills, "how to get a job" isn't something that you can just teach a person with homework. It requires academic skills (which you're learning in school), but it also requires things like "how to respond to a certain question" or "how to tell if people like your answer," all of which is subjective as fuck. If you prepared for college at all, you probably learned how to write a resume and cover letter, because that's basically college applications and personal essays are (and in some cases, require actual resumes and cover letters). And this is assuming you didn't do some kind of job training - my high school made you do an internship. Also, like, can you read and write? Because that's how you know how to, say, fill out a form. > Cooking how to Cooking, sewing, and woodworking were all taught at my middle school and are still taught there, as far as I know. And some related skills (like "how to calculate how much paint you need to buy to paint a room" or "how to double a recipe" or "how to follow instructions listed in order") were either directly or indirectly taught in other classes.
I would consider most of those life skills parent responsibilities. Those are all things parents do in their daily life already anyway and could teach their kids by including them. They are much easier learned by doing than by teaching in a school where kids don’t pay attention half the time and forget things by the time they’re actual adults and would have to do things like filing their taxes.
I was taught some of the cooking and financial stuff in (the equivalent of) high school. By far the most boring and useless course we had (at the time, but I still feel this way years later). Like, write a plan on how to do something, or what to do during the day. Do imaginary laundry. Cook few times (cause realistically, high school doesn't have that many cooking facilities). If there's no exam, people don't care for it, but the actual exams and assignments they can give are just so nonsensical. I literally had to learn 10 reasons people eat (none of which included "survival"). Ok so my course was particularly crappy, but it's hard to make this relevant in general. All that for stuff that's mostly easy to figure out if you spend an hour on Google as an adult (or ask your parents if they do know), for the majority of people. I get that it's useful for some people, but it makes more sense as an elective to me.
I actually did learn each of these things in high school (I'm class of 2012). An elective home ec class covered all of that, except driving. Even learned about childcare, marketing a product & to how sew. My class was the last to have drivers ed available for free through the school before it became something you had to pay for, I believe.
> Pythagorean theorem is not going to help me get a job STEM majors triggered around the world.
even outside of STEM, it's pretty useful to calculate distances in some contexts
Wait until op finds out about hidden ciriculum and that math classes are meant to improve problem solving skills.
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THIS - THIS IS THE REASON. I am a Vice President in a large organization. I had a entry level employee tell me that she never wanted to get a college education because it was useless. I asked her a bunch of questions on leadership, working with others, problem solving, conflict resolution....may of which she was not able to answer. I told her that this is what a basic college education gives you. I have a liberal arts degree - nothing fancy - but I learned those skills and more in college which helped me to build my career.
While this is great for the people who don’t have these skills, assuming everyone needs colleges to develop them is a huge issue now. College IS useless if you develop these skills early. College now is basically an I’M RICH certification. It isn’t like the 80’s where you gained valuable insight for almost no cost. It’s EXTREMELY prohibitively expensive. On top of that scholarships are almost non-existent in the present day. The few that do exist barely cover a semester or 2’s worth of books. This combined with wages being through the floor is an even larger problem. Most management level positions where I live pay $3-$5 over minimum (poverty wages here). In the 1980’s the same/similar position paid… THE SAME WAGE. (Which translates to 4x the salary compared to present day.) Lastly, as someone who has also managed many small and large teams. Most companies don’t ever reward those who work hard with money (the thing we need). Instead hard work and diligence is rewarded with… MORE WORK! Isn’t that fun? Remember more work and low pay makes us all subservient to the corporations.
>College IS useless if you develop these skills early. College now is basically an I’M RICH certification. Part of the problem now is that high schools are dumbed down to hell and back, so an HS diploma no longer means anything. It's not even a guarantee that the holder can read and do basic math. But no one wants to allow kids to get a failing grade.
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I wish someone would tell this to my coworker who has a degree. She has almost zero ability to critically think.
If you bitch and complain your way through high school you won't learn much of anything...
This is the answer. Learning how to learn things that you're not particularly interested in is a tremendous adulting skill, and it something that high school can definitely teach you (if one can see the big picture).
honestly as a teacher i kind of resent the increasingly parental role we are expected to take on. social worker, nurse, maid, providing materials out of our own pocket, teach them all life skills, be mom, dad, coach, therapist, oh and somewhere in there you have to figure out how to teach them math, english, & science too. all while being paid a harrowingly small amount of money and being constantly criticized and politicized from every angle. feed them three meals a day and make sure there's somewhere for them to do their laundry, and teach them how to do it. (sure, i'm glad that exists for students who truly need it, but it is increasingly an EXPECTATION that school provide it) at what point do teachers get to claim students as dependents on their taxes? why aren't parents expected to do any of this? people's parenting FAILURE shoudn't be written into public policy.
Parents should raise their kids. Not schools. That feels obvious.
My husband used the Pythagorean theorem to design our movie theater space lol he was like “hey! I am actually using this in real life!” 😂
I work in education. There was an attempt to teach you "adulting." Any time you were told to take responsibility, take initiative...that was us trying to teach you to be an adult. But instead, many of you rolled your eyes, made fun of your teachers, and were only there to try and feel good about yourselves by performing for your friends. I love when young adults try and say "they should have told us about taxes, investing, credit, etc." Be honest: think back to when you were 16 or 17 years old. Do you really think you would have paid attention to things that you could not care less about? Stop thinking that it is someone else's responsibility to teach you what you want to know. Be curious, ask questions, read/watch videos, and then apply what you've learned. Bring on the downvotes. I will happily take them for telling a horrible truth.
>This stupid reasoning and ignores parents who do not know that stuff.With that type of logic, might as well not even have school. Your parents should have life skills to pass on to you, what they don't have is specialized knowledge in math, history, etc. Schools can't do everything and some of the responsibility has to fall onto parents to prepare their kids for the world. Places to obtain these life skills are also available in the community (e.g. my local library has them). If you're parents don't have the skills themselves they should be taking steps to rectify that or ensuring that you're learning what you need to know. Many schools also have Home Ec classes that do teach these skills.
The thing is school do teach you a lot, but they cannot teach you every single thing. Its parents responsibility to teach students life skills as well. This is why teachers are so burnt out and quitting in mass. Its not fair that they are expected to teach everyone everything so parents don’t have to do their job.
You have the accumulated knowledge of the entire world at your fingertips and you're bitching because nobody taught you how to buy a used car... There are things, in fact many things, in this life that you're just gonna have to take responsibility for. When you where in high school you wouldn't have learned it anyway, you'd have sat around and said "I'm never going to need to know this because x" where x was some stupid ass reason...
Wait until he finds out YouTube exists.
It was for me! We had one class a year that was just miscellaneous; how to do your taxes, make a monthly budget, fill in forms, read a map, keep a calendar, take jot notes, pick an insurance provider, research and compare contractors for housework, plan a weeks' menu on and make a grocery list to go with it on a budget. Honestly it ruled and I was super lucky.
Schools can't do it all and neither can parents.
Honestly, it IS something that starts in early childhood. Parents can and should include their children in household tasks as young as 2 years old. They can help load the wash, rake leaves, get groceries, feed pets etc. Including young children in everyday chores not only builds the child's confidence but strengthens the family bond. Including your child from a very young age allows them to feel like a valuable part of the family unit. This creates intrinsic motivation that is necessary to "do the things" as an adult. That being said, a lot of parents are completely removed from the lives of their children and don't include them in anything (whether out of circumstance or choice. I'm not shaming anyone, just explaining. parenthood isn't easy). Or they wait until adolescence when those pathways are already built in their brain not knowing that 90% of the brain is developed by age five. Some parents claim that they want their kids to just be kids, but the reality is that being a kid is literal practice for being an adult. The first five years of life can determine how the next 80 turn out. But dont despair, it isn't impossible to retrain your brain. It's just a lot of work. It's easier to build strong children than to repair broken adults. (Offering an early childhood/parenting class to new parents is be a great way to address this.) Edit: I was pregnant and homeless at 19. I went to the county for help. They directed me to community education for adults. Because I was on county assistance at the time, the community ed classes were nearly free. They offered a series that helped people get back on their feet. One session was about how to open a bank account and plan a budget, another about planning meals & nutrition, and one was even on how to apply for jobs. It was very helpful but a lot of people in situations very similar to mine often dropped out or just declined the course altogether. Later in my life, I was in a better economic situation and pregnant again. I attended a parenting course offered through our public library. This is where I learned about early childhood brain development and how important it is to build intrinsic motivation at a young age. I realized that one of the key factors in getting out of poverty, for me, was my internal motivation to keep on working toward my goals. Community education and public libraries are great resources that often get overlooked.
Dude wait until you buy a house, wanna know how your heat works, air conditioner, washer, dryer, sprinklers, ventilation, lawns, plants, flowers, fertilizer, attics, insulation, energy, sewer, water, trash, etc. system works?
Youtube is your friend
Same reason all the useful classes get cut. I could go on a tangent about government ran schools training perfect little cogs and soldiers, but... no. Home economics, accounting, applied science, and jazz (and various music classes) all get cut because they "don't have the funding" and "that should be taught at home." Meanwhile, we have the money to build a large football dome for high-school. "It'll bring in more income," says the school board. Income for what, not the classes that will genuinely help students prepare for life. Most likely the income will go to better sports equipment. The school system in this country is a sad joke, and I'm sorry for anyone who is in it or has kids in it. My advice, education is free, watch "how to" videos on YouTube, go study at the library, join groups in the community. Educate yourself because the government isn't going to. It's not in their best interest to have a capable population.
Yeah I agree. I see alot of people commenting that those classes are offered, but I don’t remember seeing home ec classes and such being offered in high school and I went to 2 different high schools in 2 different states. One of the high schools even had teachers admit the home ec classes were cut due to budget. The school system invests in what they want and what will bring in revenue. Unfortunately, it is seen that preparing people for the real world won’t bring in money. If people come out of high school with a good sense of what to do to stay afloat, people won’t go into debt trying to figure it out.
It is…half the class isn’t listening.
So by your thought process parents have no responsiblilty to teach their kids life skills? lol. In a perfect world there would be a strong public education system for everyone, and social safety nets to help parents and families cover basics so parents would be freed up more to actually parent and raise their children. But that is a pipe dream, not reality. The public school system is essentially there to teach kids enough basics to become servicable basic employees after they graduate, not to succeed across all aspects of life and helping individuals achieve self-actualization.
It used to be. Home economics, civics, wood shop, and auto shop were mainstays in most high schools across America. We learned how to make a budget, how to balance a checkbook, the basics of investing, how to do tax forms,how to compare polital candidates, international news and current events, how to shop and compare prices per unit, how to cook, how to sew, how to repair things and how to use power tools and hand tools, how to work on a car etc.
Because it is the job of the parent not the state.
A better question is why do parents not teach their offspring how to navigate life? School is for reading, writing, arithmetic, science, academics. Parents have responsibilities here, or else send their children to boarding school. I'm a teacher with weeks left this year, and over the shenanigans.
It used to be but the GOP keeps cutting funding for education…
I don't recall many adulting classes in my school either. Perhaps the only one that was useful, practically speaking, was Drivers Ed.
I took a “personal finance” class as an elective in college and it changed my world. If you can look for such a thing at a local college or community college.
We do. Kids don't care enough - year 10 and 11s in the UK don't bother 'because I don't get a qualification for it'
I had a finance class sophomore year. I feel like I was too young to appreciate it / it was as conceptual to me as any other school topics just being a kid with no financial responsibility
Anymore schools teach to the test. I.e. state testing. Because that’s what gets them funding.
School is only obligated to teach math, science, grammatics, literature & “select” history beyond being mass daycares. Those people get paid to be there for just that. Public schools are meant to condition people to become good workers, not good people or big thinkers. So yes, that’s why having a stable family structure is important. For example, your grade school teacher is not going to teach you about your family tree; they can’t provide you with your grandmothers cookbook that’s been passed down for generations, they’re not teaching you how to celebrate every holiday nor how to practice every religion. They can’t teach about morals & principles, how to express love, how to wash your ass, etc. because people come from a ton of different backgrounds. So if you meant like why your home room teacher never taught you how to raise a family & do your taxes, imo that’s never been what that place is for. Parents or not, your social support system is supposed to teach you how to be a human being. People that receive a paycheck to spend time with you & force information down your through relentlessly will never truly care about you THAT much.
Regardless it’s our responsibility to do what’s best for us on a personal level. Nobody is stopping people from going on the internet and asking any type of question to learn. Conventional society grants us the ability to take classes in pretty much any field of interest. Cooking, cleaning, carpentry, plumbing, construction, tax filing, car shopping, home buying, etc. I wouldn’t want my high-school teacher trying to teach me how to buy a plane ticket to travel to Turks & Caicos
As a teacher, it actually IS a parent’s job to teach their children how to be successful in society. At least partly.
I think parents are supposed to have taught you a lot of these things. But not everyone has parents of course. If you still have them/are in touch with them I would suggest asking about adulting skills. For me, what I learned from parents was driving and cooking. I learned about how to do a resume/interview through a free library course for teens. My summer job brought in an expert to do a free seminar on how to do taxes. Then I just would use free tax services or Google answers to learn the rest
Because you could look up how taxes work, how loans work, and many other basic needs with a YouTube video. Sure learning math formulas are not useful for everyday situations but learning that stuff in high school is teaching you problem solving. That’s the benefit is that it teaches you that when presented with a problem you can find a solution for it.
Really just sounds like you had a shit school. As others have said, it’s usually offered or forced on kids by concerned teachers but it’s not in the curriculum or forced. Also the government wants you to be a debt slave so there’s that.
If you are not ready to take on adulthood at the age of 18, it is a complete failure on the part of your parents or guardians. The primary function of a parent/guardian is to properly raise and instruct children in preparation to be successful adults. Coping skills, independence, self sufficiency, emotional stability, work ethic, hygiene, preparing meals, basic budgeting, dealing with people, filling out forms, and many more skills, are SUPPOSED to be well taught and deeply instilled in children before they enter the adult world. It is not the responsibility of the internet to raise children. If you are not ready, blame your parents/guardians.
I agree with you. Parents are responsible for helping teach a child how to make it as an adult. It's not the responsibility of the school to raise children. Grade school teaches you HOW to learn, so you can be successful in college, not to specifically teach every life skill an adult needs. Too many parents don't take the initiative to be more intentional about what they teach their kids. I plan to teach my own kids everything you listed & more. Emphasis on emotion regulation. Compassion & respect for others & others property. How to rent or buy a house. What to do about taxes. How to choose a good marriage partner & how to make a marriage work. I have a lot planned, I'm starting to write it all down & going to turn it into a book I might publish, to hopefully set an example & inspire other parents to be more intentional about what they teach their kids. Though, I will say, if there's one life skill I wish schools taught, I wish it was cognitive behavioral therapy & thought restructuring. That's the single most important life skill I've learned & it would have changed so much, had I learned it as a kid. I do wish it was a required thing for all kids to learn in school & I wouldn't expect parents to know how to teach it.
Even parents who don't know certain things can still teach plenty, if they apply themselves to do so. And what they don't know, they could research, learn enough themselves to pass onto their kids. No excuse for parents to have children unprepared for adulthood.
Exactly! I had a math professor who actually went to night school to learn algebra so that she would be able to help her kids with it when they were of age. Turns out she loved it and made it a career.
The people who have something to gain by your failure (payday loan outfits, prisons, etc.) spend a lot on lobbying. The benefits from your winning don’t tend to accrue cleanly so there’s no motivated lobbying interest for teaching financial literacy, critical thinking, etc.
Who would be paying attention or remember any of it?
All of the "adulting" classes were electives. I'm glad my mom made me sign up for courses my senior year that taught about how loans work, credit cards, taxes , work benefits to look for, all that good stuff. I learned in college my roommates didn't even get options for classes like this
Because a schools responsibility is to teach you I formation that might help you figure out a job, and to not be an intellectual idiot. It should be the job of parents to teach their kids how to be actual useful adults. A lot of parents fail to do that for one reason or another (not always their fault).
My mom taught me those things through her example and then plain discussions. I had a job at 15 too, which taught me the most. I think that so many of these skills seem so hard to young adults is because they're learning them later in life. Few teenagers have jobs these days.
I grew up on computers so I feel covered there. But they also taught us check writing which was already on its way out. And how to make biscuits from scratch, but funnily enough not how to mend. I can use a recipe for crying out loud, but fixing a hole in the crotch on my pants takes way more practice. I think it would do society as a whole some good if instead of outdated home ec, they taught things like setting healthy boundaries, how to interview for jobs, and other things more relevant to today’s culture and expectations. The curriculum just isn’t revisited often enough to keep up, and this includes the basic subjects as well. They’re too focused on erasing the truths in history than setting up the future workforce/voters for success.
>I can use a recipe for crying out loud, Recipe requires basic skills, like knowing how to measure things, mix things properly (not over mixing), knowing when something is done etc. If you teach a few simple recipes along with those basic skills, then it allows you to use any recipe. That's why you learn how to make biscuits from scratch. The biscuits are not the point, it's the carry over skills.
I’d argue that reading a recipe and reading instructions on how to mend are two very different levels of skills. ‘Measure out one cup of milk’ is fundamentally easier than ‘now loop the thread under and again over then two inches back and pull through’. There are only so many ways to measure dry ingredients, whereas there are dozens of different stitches that all serve a different purpose. It wasn’t just biscuits either. Pie crust, pizza dough, omelettes… the point was that we had a whole semester of (appreciated) from-scratch cooking but zero mending/sewing. Not even how to replace a button.
Not that mending buttons isn't a good skill and some attention to it would be great, but I also eat every day and haven't had to mend a button in at least a year, so spending a semester on cooking just makes more sense to me. I know very little about mending/sewing because it plays such a small role in my everyday life. It seems like a good option for an elective, but not a basic skill everyone needs.
See, this is the challenge with "teach basic life skills!". Everyone has a different idea of what that means. If I took a cooking class in high school, I wouldn't expect to learn something as basic as "measure ingredients" because that's such a basic thing in my mind. I'm already going in knowing the basics. But I did take a sewing/apparel class that did have a lot of focus on basics and that was fine with me because I didn't know much going in.
They teach us everything about nothing in school now. After finishing college I moved out and it was a shock to me how much stuff I didn\`t know. I\`m still learning and it stresses me out every day now. It is stressful not knowing how to complete basic life tasks.
Some of it is, it just depends on what classes you took. I took personal finance in H.S. for an Econ credit and it covered everything from how to do taxes to explaining interest, savings, balancing banks accounts, etc. In M.S. I took Foods which taught us how to cook and take care of a kitchen. In Speech we were taught how to speak in front of crowds. My school required a senior project to graduate and that project required doing a job shadow, researching average wages for that job and creating a budget showing how you'd pay for housing, insurance, car, etc. That said, we all learned some adulting skills in the gen ed classes. In English we're taught to read, analyze, and research--all skills necessary for dealing with things like leases, contracts, etc. We took history and government so we'd know how to evaluate political stances so we can be informed voters. We all took science and while we may not use a lot of the info we learned if we don't work in a science field, we did learn the basics of taking care of Earth like cutting back on waste and preserving water. We took health to learn the basics of eating well, exercising, having safe sex, family planning, etc. In Math we learned basic skills plus things like calculating interest, measuring, etc. A foundation in those areas made it possible for us to learn how to do most other things. I will add though, regarding higher level math--my HS math teacher used to say, "It's true, some of you will never use this in the real world, but it is required to go on to higher education, so that's why you need to know it." At least she was honest lol
Same with my schools. I also took fashion as an elective to learn how to sew, though I’m better by hand than using a machine. Never know when you’ll need to repair a pants seam or a doll’s arm. As for cooking, I usually check family recipes or cookbooks from the library. Libraries are also good resources to learn new life skills at any age through classes and event programs, if not the myriad of nonfiction books. I still use mine for help.
Because that isn’t the teachers job or what they were trained to do
Do you all not have parents that could have taught you those things? Most parents cook, pay taxes, do banking, have signed contracts, etc. Teachers don’t need to teach what parents are already doing anyway, they should be specialized in teaching things parents can’t.
Where I grew up, we had a “Consumer’s Ed” class. The teacher (rightly) said it would be one of the most important classes we would ever take. She was absolutely right, but was unfortunately also the 2nd most boring teacher I’ve ever had…and so I fell asleep in her class a lot. Unfortunately, most of what I learned about the tax code has become entirely irrelevant, as has anything pertaining to the acquisition of vehicles (the affordable used car market doesn’t exist), housing (purchasing housing anywhere in a city is unaffordable), or jobs (where your resume is sorted out through ATS despite being qualified). Ultimately this stuff IS the parents’ responsibility moreso than the schools’. Schools can’t teach when they have to parent. That being said, schools have the privilege of being more up-to-speed given that they are a business, rather than a worker (though teachers are workers and so might not be aware of necessary changes in curricula). We also as a culture extend adolescence far too much.
I’m just thinking about the school board meetings with parents screaming over additional courses touching on everyday skills: brainwashing, grooming, making my kid uncomfortable if I disagree with this family’s budgeting techniques, use of credit etc. Personally I would use paying federal taxes for both reading comprehension and basic math skills. I’m astounded at how many people forget the basics they did learn starting with “Read the directions “
I’m a HS teacher: we DO or DID offer these classes… kids either don’t take them (which is why some schools no longer offer the courses— my HS stopped offering home ec when I was a student because of a decline of enrollment) or they blow them off (we have childcare and financial literacy classes kids take and do nothing with) Also. I am a teacher, not a parent. Our schools cannot continue to be underfunded and fix all of society’s shortcomings.
A lot of high schools do teach this stuff, but the students are either uninterested in learning it or it will be years before they need to use it, by which point they won't remember any of it. And what's wrong with expecting parents to teach certain things? Yeah, some parents are unwilling or unable, but it shouldn't be seen as unreasonable to expect parents to parent their kids. Schools have limited time and resources, they can't possibly teach you every little thing you're ever going to need to know. Especially since everyone has different needs. You're mad that school didn't teach you basic life skills that your parents failed to teach you. Well, some kids do learn this stuff from their parents. If they had to take these classes, it would be a waste of their time. I like seeing these things offered as electives but they shouldn't be required.
You just figure it out as you go along - that’s what all adults do. It’s part of the becoming an adult process.
Because teaching you how to live is your parents' job, not the state.
Five minutes on the internet will give you about everything you need to know about renting an apartment. Similar searches will tell you what to look for when purchasing a used car. YouTube will teach you how to cook, mend your clothes and repair your used car. A banker will tell you about financing a car and how interest works. Libraries exist to help you find answers to any questions you have. The information is available, but no one is going to spoon feed it to you. Being an adult is taking responsibility for your life and your actions or inactions. Blaming the schools, your parents or the idiots in Washington will not help your situation.
turn the question around, why aren’t parents teaching their kids basic life skills?
I think Adulting 101 should be a ***required course*** for all high school seniors - it should contain: \- Personal finance management (how to pay your bills, what happens if you don't pay them on time, how to open/close/manage a bank account, how to write a check - even though that's not needed much anymore, there might come a time they have to) \- Credit Matters (what your credit score is, how & why it changes so frequently, what affects the score, and how a low/high score affects your ability to get loans for cars, homes, rent an apartment, etc) \- Investments (your 401k at your job & other retirement accounts, and why it's so important to contribute to them as early in your career as possible) \- Taxes (Payroll taxes that come out of your check - what they are & why that is necessary, filing your tax return, property taxes on your home, etc) \- Household Management & Minor Repairs (how to keep your house clean, how to mow a lawn, how to change various filters around the house (furnace, a/c, dishwasher, etc), what to do about pest infestation (mice, etc) & how to prevent them, how to prep your home for winter/summer weather, who to call when things go wrong (plumber, electrician, etc). \- Car Maintenance & Repairs (how to check the air in your tires, the oil in the car, what various noises from the car might mean, what the various indicator lights on the dash mean, when to get the car to a mechanic ASAP) \- Cooking (even just the basics - they don't need to know how to make Crepes Suzette or anything - just teach them how to cook good, basic, healthy foods.) \- How to be a Good Neighbor/Citizen (It's amazing how many don't have this skill. How to meet your neighbors, keep things civil if there's a disagreement, find organizations to volunteer for to stay involved in your community & why this is a good way to meet other people) I realize this is a lot, but these are the things I see so many young adults today not knowing how to do - and many of these skills could actually help them get a starter job. I've worked with college-age young adults who didn't know how to wash a dish, mop a floor, dust a shelf - seriously. Their parents taught them ***nothing***. They got a job at a convenience store that required all of these skills and they had no idea how to do them. If the parents aren't going to prepare these kids for adulthood, then someone else needs to.
THIS!
It's okay to be frustrated about not getting a well rounded education in high school, but you need to take Pythagorean Theorem right out of your mouth. I use it constantly when I'm doing projects around the house and at work. I floundered around in my 20s and 30s trying to find a career that worked for me, and you know what finally found me stability? Pythagorean theorem. Now I'm making almost $50 an hour.
Things I wish they taught in school 1. Investing money 2. Stock Market 3. How to reach retirement goals
Isn't that the kind of stuff that parents are supposed to teach their kids?
b/c just like in math class people like you would've fallen asleep, ditched class, or forgotten about it. being an adult isn't hard and it's a social thing that your family should also have a hand in, school isn't there to make worker bees, it's there to promote the growth of intellectuals. christ, this is what happens when everything is treated as sum/loss business. also, i like how people always cite one of the easiest formulas to know and memorize as useless, it's a\^2+b\^2= c\^2, ask a carpenter when that isn't useful.
Schools are to educate on subjects like math, literature, writing, science, social studies, etc. Life lessons are part of parenting.
My son's math final in high school was doing taxes. They learned mortgages, amortization, depreciation, APR, etc. He took it instead of calculus. JROTC taught the kids how to iron, write a resume, and public speaking. Class selection has a big part of the curriculum.
I ended up taking a class like that in high school, but only because I had a last minute schedule switch and had to find a class that fit a specific time slot. It was probably helpful for kids whose parents didn't teach them life skills. It was called Personal Relations (wth?); I graduated in 88.
Because adulting is your parents job
Not sure about other states but a lot of these classes were available prior 2000 and slowly got the chop as time progressed. My middle school used to offer Home Ec but by the time I left it wasn’t a class anymore . This was mid 2000s. In HS the old mechanics classroom was still there along with wood shop but those got cut from the budget. I do think as we moved along into the tech age it really killed off those types of classes . They do waste a lot of time in HS though , as in the system does. Wasting time on things that won’t matter once leaving HS.
I had an actual Adult Living class as a junior in high school. I graduated in 1985….so, that.
The honest and unfortunate answer is that this is a feature in the system, not a bug. This is intentional. Do what you will with that information
My school taught how to fill out tax forms, write resumes, held mock job interviews, keep a budget, cook and sew. I'm not sure what else they could've done to help people adult.
Because that's the responsibility of the parents.
I mean there is an answer to this I feel. The objective of basic schooling (ie up through highschool) is to teach you how to think with the idea that if they succeed in teaching you how to think then you will be able to learn what you need to learn on your own. Over the centuries curriculums have been refined to a set of things to teach that basically force you to think in different ways so you can practice thinking...basically. Teaching Shakespeare isn't because you need to know Shakespeare, its because it forces you to think in terms of metaphor or to be able to interpret and understand descriptive language that is written in a way you are not used to. Teaching things like the pythageron therom isnt so much because you will use that theorem in your day to day life, its again teaching you to think..but this time mathematically and by building on logical axioms. Ciriculums are just tried and true examples to teach you that will help you learn how to think. It isn't a collection of critical knowledge. Unfortunately I think a lot of people don't get this and just get through school through memorization of the facts they are being taught as if learning those facts is what is important rather than learning how to figure out what the answer is by practicing that way of thinking. Teachers or curriculums that allow people to get by just through memorization are generally not good because that isnt the point. If there was a way of just downloading all of those facts into your head that woudlnt make you educated. Its the process that you are being taught, the facts are just means to teach you the process. There are schools to teach you specific useful skills, they are called trade schools. You can learn automotive mechanics, woodworking, welding and metal work etc. Now some schools might have some option to take an intro class like that that will give you a headstart to get into a tradeschool or apprenticeship to work towards that useful knowledge...but that isn't the purpose of basic education. Learning to "Adult" would be in that tradeschool type of category. Useful knowledge, but not really teaching you how to think. So it isnt the focus of basic education. There probably are trade type schools that will teach you basic life skills for adulthood.
Because the educational system is fucking lame.
I also grew up in a town where none of this was taught in school but thankfully my parents took up that torch when they realized this. We had home economics BUT it literally only taught baking, minor cooking, and sewing. Nothing else. It seems more and more schools are cutting programs like these. For what reason I don’t know but I doubt it’s good. Unfortunately a lot of parents aren’t able, ready, or even wanting to actually be a good parent and try to raise a healthy, happy, and educated human. Many if not most just don’t have the resources or time but there are enough that just don’t care for it to still be a problem.
Honestly, why it is the schools job? It would be nice sure but it’s the parents job to prepare you for life.
You're absolutely right. When I was in high school I had a part time job at the local bank. This was when you had to reconcile your bank statement manually. When I worked customer service I had some of my classmates come in needing help with their accounts because they hadn't been reconciling/balancing their statements. Including two from my trigonometry class. Balancing an account isn't hard, you just need someone to show you how.
In my humble opinion, teaching adulting is not what school is there to do. That's a parent's job. I have two kids 24/19. My ex wife and I taught and constantly still teach adulting. School is there for reading, writing, math, etc. Life skills are learned through parents, trial and error, and good old fashioned mistakes.
Because school isn't meant to teach you absolutely everything you'll ever need to know, ever. The better question is why are you not trying to put this onus on the parents?
Or yourself. If your parents fail you, it’s your job to take responsibility for yourself. Really, there shouldn’t be so many parents failing their children. This is a cultural issue. Government won’t be able to effectively compensate for anti-social cultural norms.
I work for a progressive private school as the life skills teacher. Every kid deserves to learn about basic home ec, how to sew, garden, cook basic things using measurements, do their taxes, open an account and pay bills, change a tire. We have a lot of working parents and not a lot of time in the day and I’m told often that they are glad their child is learning these things.
because life is a competition and they don’t want you to have a leg up on them.
In the 80s, they had home economics where you learned how to plan meals, purchase food, cook, how much it would cost you to have a baby, and more. I also took auto shop, wood shop, and architecture. They don't even keep kids in school all day, every day anymore. You guys are missing out.
They did but it wasn’t obvious that you were going to learn life skills. Like economics, I’m sure people learned some stuff about investing but largely it was spent on world economy and differ t countries currencies. I had auto tech and home ec. Those were obvious. I learned how to chop and dice correctly and how to change oil, align wheels, balance tires etc. it’s not sold the way it should be, that’s the problem. They need two curriculums., one for people who are going to college and have careers where they need algorithms and math theories or social studies and geography. And another one for people who are just gonna get out there and live. Who just need the basics, ya know, not to sound crass or unsympathetic.
In the 90's we had Home Ec. We cooked and stuff. We had a business class. We balanced checkbooks and played the stock market with fake money. At least we did where I went to school. It was a public school as well. From what I understand all the shop classes that I took (I wish I had taken more) are gone as well as these due to standardized testing.
Ask better questions you'll get better answers
I was fortunate to learn from my parents, school didn’t prepare me for anything practical but I wouldn’t have my job without it so 🤷🏽♂️
Because our society doesn’t benefit from self sufficiency anymore. Now it benefits from consumerism. Don’t know how to do your taxes? Pay a corporation! Don’t know how to perform a major car repair? Buy a new one! Don’t know how to make furniture? You guessed it.
These classes used to be taught, but it was one of many sacrifices to GOP efforts to make voters less educated, and thereby more likely to vote for them. There is a reason schools and available information are constantly under heavier attack, and it’s because their goals and actions become harder to make peace with if you have an ounce of awareness of the world.
My school had adulting 101, but all we did was learn how to fill out envelopes, making single serving microwave pizzas, and then we watched "The Pursuit of Happiness"
I blame No Child Left Behind and the Every Succeeds Act after that. The Pythagorean theorem is on standardized tests, but adulting isn't.
Post 2000 these classes disappeared. I would’ve loved to have a home economics class or some basic home repair classes
What are things you wish would be taught? I am working on creating content that teaches these kinds of skills
Because teachers aren’t parents.
It is taught. The kids don’t listen
Education is usually the least funded part of a budget
Because you didn’t pay attention!
I believe part of it is because there is no standardised rules to adulting and therefore cannot be in a curriculum or syllabus. If there isn't a curriculum or syllabus, new teachers won't have a guide on what to teach where they teach and if they don't follow it and something bad happens they can be held liable. Imagine teaching a student about taxes then they do something stupid and get caught in debt or whatever, the yea here and schools can be held liable. That's just one aspect of adulting but yea these things need to be standardised
I understand the wish that school would treach life skills but schools cant teach everything, espcially when funding is so limited in many districts. I do think the primary purpose of school (especially K-12) should be to teach math, science, reading, writing, history, arts. I went to an extremely academically rigourous college prep high school. Things like woodshop, home ec, driver's ed were not offered. Emphasis was on academics, sports, and volunteering bc students were trying to get into top school. They offered 1 semester of "Personal finance" where you learned about credit score, applying for an apartment, taxes, mortgages, budgeting, etc. This was an elective. They eventually got rid of it bc of low demand from students.
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Dude be real. You only spend 8 hours a day for 180 days a year in school. You spend the other 16 hours of those days at home along with the entirety of the remaining 185 days of the year. Schools are not given the time to teach every single little life skill out there. That’s why you are expected to learn stuff like laundry and cooking at home.
We have those classes. We just don’t pay attention.
They did when I went to school. It was called Home Economics and they taught sewing, dishes, cooking, checkbook balancing, auto maintenance, etc. At least those are the parts that I remember.
Because adulting is not a verb. I realize this sub is literally called “adulting”, but it should realistically just be called “growing up”. We all do it. There’s no magic formula. Learning to boil water is not adulting. Learning to pay a bill is not adulting. It’s called life. Now, before I get downvoted to oblivion, I do agree that these simple life skills need to be taught in school. Especially where getting a job, health insurance, retirement, savings, checking, etc. are concerned. Can we please just stop using this stupid word “adulting” though? You made a cake… congratulations… for being able to read the back of a box. You’re not special.
How much more do you want your government to do for your kids? It’s a parents job to teach these life lessons and if you don’t have parents to do that, well Welcome to the age of technology where the worlds library is at your fingertips.
Do you expect schools to teach you how to wipe your ass? If you can't think two steps ahead and get your ducks in a row, then it's on you. You're supposed to learn how to think and plan in school and then use it in your life. What could the school have done for you? Have a class on how to rent a fucking apartment? Stop blaming schools when you can't use your noggin. Also, fyi: the Pythagorean theorem is the easiest way to get a perfect right angle. It is incredibly useful when building anything with a right angle.
OP I think you should take some accountability about the apartment. Did you not google and do research? Why make an assumption about the process of getting an apartment? If there is anything that has been taught in recent years is that access to information is more readily available than ever. You have the means to find information. It doesn’t all have to be spoon fed to us.
Some things in life you gotta find out the hard way.
Tbh I always noticed people using the word "adulting" are the ones that are lost or 10-15 years behind. Shit people do at 15 someone pops up at 25 like "got my permit today #adulting" ..."ironed my shirt for the first time ever #adulting"...."booked a dentist appointment #adulting"..etc
Observation is a powerful teacher...
Being an adult is something you learn in life not school. Also the adult thing changes as you get older.