AIBU to say they should NOT teach it in schools

[Calvinlookingforhobbs]

‘It’ being any problem that appears in our society... budgeting for adults, healthy eating, parenting skills, contraception, gardening, etc surely education and parenting are different?

I suspect its annoying for children like mine who have already 1 on 1 been taught about all these important issues at home by us but it is essential for all the children whose parents just won't bother.

IWanna It's not about taking priority but putting the most useful elements alongside academic learning. As you rightly say, religion can be an important part of history and politics. But the religion where applicable to history can be taught with history.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying we chuck everything out. But the world has changed, parenting has changed. Looking at the mess we're in today, I'm not sure our children are being given the necessary skills they need and clearly we can't rely on parents to do it - in many cases, they don't know themselves or are in a mess themselves.

Many parents, for all sorts of reasons, don’t/can’t discuss some things with their own children or mean to do it later.

Whether it to do with finance, living healthily, sex, fitness, drink - you name it some parent will have omitted to tell their children.

I’m probably guilty myself.

Sometimes children are too embarrassed to ask further questions but need to.

Despite being a technology teacher I ended up with sex for PSHE. At the end of the session I used to answer anonymously written questions. I’d hand out sheets of paper, collect them in, shuffle them, read them out and answer them. Some were obviously ones they couldn’t ask parents, some were where parents simply hadn’t mentioned things.

I later progressed to car crashes.

Sometimes parents telling their children isn’t enough. We ran a ‘wasted lives’ presentation covering young drivers, drink etc. (Google it)

Emotionally hard going for staff never mind children.

A fireman telling a year group about going to a road accident to find his son dead in it soon quietens a room of 16 year olds who think they are bullet proof.

Cp

I think these things are also important. Children, who don’t receive the appropriate education are at a disadvantage. And what about those, who make their careers in advisory capacities, soft skills, budgeting etc?

Crossing over to life skills also could as a pp said be integrated in a more inventive way. My friend is teacher training in primary and she says the same thing. How to teach holistically and build on lessons learnt as well as weaving in learning alongside the core subjects.

I think it might be fair to teach these things if taught well, but they so often aren't, and I agree, where's the time these days?

In my daily life, I make zero use of trigonometry, compulsory football, scripture or the rainfall patterns in South America.

I left school with no knowledge of budgeting, working in meetings, organisation structures, writing a CV, or interviewing, which would have done me infinitely more good

Luckily I picked up quite a few things later.

You could also say a parent can teach their DC most of the stuff they learn at primary so they shouldn’t be taught how to tell the time because that’s the parents responsibility. Life skills are important so they should be taught IMO.

You could incorporate a lot of basic things into Maths and English as pps have suggested.

Lucky kids whose parents know how to do 'budgets'.

In a perfect world, I would suggest 10 minutes after registration once or twice a week where the form tutor or someone brave could cover a quick overview of how a mortgage works, what sort of internet scams are out there, how to check if a website is reliable, how the NHS works and how to access it, how to compare electricity prices (I can't do that!), why you need a will, whether there is such a thing as common law marriage etc etc. Just a quick review of some of the pitfalls. A week later there could be a ten minute test. It increases the chances of kids knowing that they need to look out for things, even if it doesn't stick.

I've been talking through some financial stuff with dc, on a 'as-and-when' basis, but I don't know what I'm missing.

I feel the need to clarify my view. I am not arguing that lifeskills are unimportant, I am saying that wth the pressure for academic success our schools can’t do it all. I repeat, I am not suggesting contraception isn’t an important thing for kids to know about, I am just questioning why some adults are held more accountable than others. Ie teachers but not parents.

But is the bigger problem that schools are under so much pressure for the academic success that actually the outcome is they are failing those pupils who aren’t as academic as the system says they should be? And doubly failing them as they are saying they aren’t academic enough and at the same time not ensuring they have the skills in place which will actually help them in life.

Pushing things like trigonometry on a lot of pupils is simply going to further reinforce the “I can’t do maths” message which is so common therefore making them at even more of a disadvantage when it comes to vital maths like budgeting.

Don't most schools have a half hour per week on 'social' type things where they cover contraception and drugs and stuff? Surely teaching basics about managing a few life skills can be thrown in there.

Calvin I think I go back to my earlier comment. The world has changed, parenting has changed. A combination of all manner of things. When I was growing up, the majority of my friends mums didn't work at all. Or possibly went to a part time job when the children were at secondary school. Now the majority of both parents work full time. We're working longer hours, commuting more, spending time on computers so we're contactable 24/7... lots more besides.

Of course teachers can't do it all. So we have to decide which bits of academia and which bits of lifeskills are the absolute essentials for the vast majority of children.

The thing with integrating religion into history teaching is that, as a subject, history gets less timetable space than core subjects. Some kids get an hour per week. It's hard for the teacher to get through everything necessary as it is.

I'd quite happily get rid of daily assemblies and whole weeks wasted on rehearsing for the Christmas play, if it freed up time to teach life skills though. And if it can be integrated into 'normal' teaching, then great. I just don't think you can cut academic time/content to do it as a separate subject.

IWanna Of course I've been out of the school system for too long now to be fully up to speed with how things are, so I have less to go on than current teachers and parents. I'm shocked to hear you say you have daily assemblies and Christmas plays. It's 25 years since I left secondary school and we'd got rid of both of those by then!

So to level the disadvantage of Jane, who has parents who lack life skills, we're going to tell Lucy, from a similar background, that despite her interest and ability GCSE and a-level maths are out of the question, because she's been preselected for functional maths and life skills.

It is bad enough that in deprived areas the subjects are often already more limited than in naice schools. But to curtail them even further by selecting dc for life skills as a subject is really low.

What we need are resources to teach the parents. At the moment, lots of families who would benefit from early intervention in this type of area don't get it because the funding simply isn't there. And teaching the parents is better than teaching the kids in many cases.

cory yes, I find that on mn too, but at the risk of stereotyping it seems to be more of a mc problem. And yet the same parents would likely be hugely offended by the suggestion they should attend basic life skills classes with the great unwashed.

I had to sit through a daily assembly and prayer 10 years ago. Can’t remember how long it was felt like a lifetime at least 15 mins. Also had 30 mins of tutor time everyday where nothing productive was ever done.

Was a Christian school but you didn’t have to be religious to attend.

I think it varies from school to school tbh. I think in my dc's secondary school the plays are voluntary and there are lots of after school rehearsals. My dc's primary school loses lots of time to nativity rehearsals etc. Both have lots of assemblies though.

While I have some sympathy with your view, I do believe that there is a significant number of parents who don't actually have a decent level of these life skills themselves, so how on earth can you expect them to pass them on to their children when they don't know how?

I do believe, as has already been said, that there are ways to use the life lessons in the basic school subjects already. Budgeting and money management, credit and interest rates, even compound interest, would fit nicely into Maths, for e.g.
It's a shame "home economics" went by the board for many schools some while ago - that was useful.
We used to have to do "human geography" in geography, which was less about land features and more about social population issues, so that's another option.

Trouble is, if you have a parent who does not know how to read, how can you expect them to help their child to read (extreme and uncommon example)? If they don't know how to do basic cooking (aside of boil in the bag or microwave meals) then how do you expect their child to learn how to cook? Their only other option, in many cases, is to learn it at school or wait until they're old enough to go to evening class!

Thumb Quite. Most parents I know don't have the time to cook proper meals very often either, what with coming home from work then having to take the kids to this club or that club.

What an idiotic thread. So everyone will be great at trigonometry, but obese, diabetic and permanently overdrawn.

Or unemployed because they are not suitably qualified to compete for jobs against international/privately educated candidates!

I'm confused by why it's aspects of maths that have been jumped on by so many as the obvious choice to fit in life skills.

On a personal note you could ditch music, art & food tech, I don't want or need any. But I'm not so stupid as to believe they are pointless in general, or so short sighted that I think no one else needs them.

I dont think it is idiotic. In an ideal world these would be skills kids learned at home but we don’t live in that world. Some kids have chaotic Home lives and this sort of stuff is useful (and incidentally taught in other countries.)

The problem is how to fit it into an already crowded curriculum. The answer can not be to cut out swathes of harder butvessential maths and science - for reasons outline by several posters on here.

PHSE is probably the place for it. And yes, cut out the religious assembly :) phse can be used efficiently to teach a range of skills in a more holistic way - one theme can be used to teach a number of skills.
If you’d cut all the extraneous nonsense out of our school day (bloody hymn singing in assembly and form tutor time) you’d have 45 mins there easily per day. Do that and work real life skills into other lessons where appropriate. Other countries manage it. It’s doable.

Thehog I think it was more a case of using trig and alegbra as examples of part of a core subject that for the vast majority of people would be of little use. Obviously for some people, art, music and drama might be their example (although not even sure they are core everywhere still).

Totally agree that parents need to step up and take more responsibility. School should be there ro equip children with the skills to indentify gaps in their knowledge and let them know where to go to fill them.

Can't cook? We've lots of basic books in hte school library, there's a great You Tube channel you could watch and how about taking Food Tech as a subject?

Contraception - covered in PHSE and here's the leaflets for the local family planning clinic.

Budgeting - something is going VERY wrong if a child gets to school leaving age and doesn't realise that you can't spend more than you earn.