Ten Things That Should Be Taught In School But Aren’t

I realize I promised Part II of “My Life in LA”. It will have to wait because you want pictures—yes, you do—and I did not have the pictures that YOU need so now I'm going to have to go out and take them which I will do this week. -Chah, it's like totally your fault and everything!

In the meantime here’s something else. My soap box please…

Ten Things That Should Be Taught In School But Aren’t

1. Critical Thinking or The Difference Between Truth and Advertising

There’s a fool born every minute and they’re being marketed to on all fronts not long afterwards. Education on assessing the value, relevance and reliability of all the information being dumped on us at an early age should be standard. Sure, kids get some street smarts on their own, but they are also buying a lot of stupid sh*t.

2. Personal Finance

There are hundreds of websites, blogs, Podcasts, TV and radio shows on personal finance. How many high school courses go much beyond balancing a checkbook?

3. Sustainable Living

Ok let’s forget about whether global warming is real for a second. Just think of the Earth as a tank of water. There’s a spigot at the bottom for what we use and supply pipe leading into the tank representing what the environment replenishes naturally over time. Do the math; if we are using more from the spigot that the supply pipe is replenishing, we are living on borrowed time be it fifty years or five hundred. The fact that this simple reality of give and take is so misunderstood and misrepresented is reason alone why it should be standard curriculum.

4. Your Kid is Your Kid, Not Your Master, Your Slave or Your Buddy

Should all the stuff I’m talking about be the job of public schools, of the GOVERNMENT??!?! Cue Star Wars “Empire Theme”. Where are the parents? Where indeed? Maybe the fact that we don’t teach effective principles of parenting before they start popping out puppies is one of the reasons we end up having to wipe everyone’s hinny for everything else?

5. Stress Management and Relaxation

Anyone can agree this has become a life skill that can make the difference between health and disease, between a pleasant productive life and one of misery. For that reason alone it should be standard curriculum.

6. Conflict Resolution

Everything we really needed to know we should have learned in kindergarten. If we did, we forgot it all by high school. I see so many adults deal with conflict three of the wrong ways: fighting with childish defensiveness and passive-aggressive stubbornness, or acquiescing to avoid confrontation with bitter resentment festering afterwards. There are some do’s and don’ts, skills if you will, to dealing with conflict, both professionally and when the cops show up because we need professionals to defuse our domestic disputes. The cops had that class, why didn’t we?

7. Understanding the Opposite Sex

Speaking for the males, we have a tendency to study the inner workings womankind just to the point that gets us laid (or not), then grudgingly take out the garbage and bring home flowers once a year to maintain. Marriage statistics make it obvious that this is not cutting it. Truth be told, I might not have believed anything my teachers had to say about relationships back in school, but it might have saved plenty heartaches and headaches even if I crashed and burned a couple times before I realized that perhaps my teachers actually knew what they were taking about.

8. Discipline & Leadership

This is a pipe dream I know. Even the military is too PC to teach true discipline at present. Discipline doesn’t have to come from being screamed at by a drill sergeant but it ain’t gunna come from wiping a kids nose for him and telling him he’s special either. I don’t think discipline should be a curriculum, it should be an expectation from school and parents a like. Leadership on the other hand can be. Like music, not everyone is going to be a Rachmaninov of leadership but everyone can handle learning a few scales. Understanding leadership doesn’t just make better leaders, it makes better teams.

9. Manners and Why Bother

Manners in some respects may be outdated and old fashioned but why is it that we let them collect that dust in the first place? Our tech-driven lives may have outlived ‘guys always paying on a date’ but nothing will ever outlive the relevance of “please” and “thank you” even network protocols utilizes “please”, “thank you” and even ‘handshakes’; networking simply wouldn’t work without it. Respect, whole reason for manners seems to have been the baby thrown out with the bathwater. What more basic social principle is there? Respect for others, respect for varying opinions, respect for property, respect for differences in race and background, respect for one’s self. It’s not easy to teach respect but if we teach and insist on manners, respect will follow. Can you imagine a world where this was commonplace?

10. Dreaming Big/Setting Goals

Overwhelmingly, the most successful people in the world know what they want, and have it written down along with a plan to achieve it. Any questions? Class dismissed.

Maybe all this stuff shouldn’t the job of public schools. We’re having a hard enough time keeping sports, music and art programs alive which all offer invaluable lessons in confidence, character and life skills far beyond making music, art and tackles. All I know is that some aspects the post war education system designed around the work-for-forty-years-for-the-same-employer paradigms is churning out ill-equip kids and ultimately an ill-equip society.

I’m out of school now it’s too late for me. I’m already just an ornery old man who occasionally complains in his blog.

Or is it?