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?

It's not either/or.

Schools can do both.

A little bit of first aid isn't going to detract from trignometry or shakespeare both useful life skills

School is the IDEAL place to teach these things. You make the thoroughly incorrect assumption that all parents/care providers teach these skills or indeed ever did!!!! School is not just there to teach kids how to pass exams, but to enable children to become well rounded, functioning members of society. Personally I would EXPECT the lessons I provide my son on contraception, sex ed, budgeting etc....to be reinforced in school.

The only people I know who want us NOT to teach about contraception are religious nutters

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.

Really? You can't? Do you live in a world where there are no credit cards, no mortgages, no loans, no credit agreements? You very clearly can spend more than you earn, and often it's widely regarded a good idea. I mean, you might believe mortgages are a bad idea because they allow you to spend a hundred grand on a house when you haven't got a hundred grand, and that the only way you should buy a house is for cash.

Making those judgements is potentially complex. And school teachers, based upon coming from a teaching family and hearing horror stories about my parents' colleagues, are no better at that than anyone else.

Teaching "don't spend more than you earn" as a budget maxim is like saying "never mind about contraception, just don't have sex, it'll all be OK". Reality is a lot more complex. If all parents could teach contraception, there would have been no unwanted pregnancies over the past thirty years. If all parents could teach about budgets, no-one would have gone bankrupt over the last thirty years, no-one would have bought PPI and no-one would have been mis-sold a pension (something teachers, as it happens, were particularly prone to).

I'm not sure teachers are qualified to teach this sort of stuff from their life experience (source: know teachers) but I'm bloody sure a lot of parents aren't.

Maybe if these were taught in schools there would be less of them in problem form in adult life.

In high school 4th-6th year I had one compulsory PSE (personal and social education) lesson a week which we did pretty much nothing in. We were shown how to put a condom on then it was all just half arsed crap that didn't give any useful information.
There was also one period of compulsory RMPS (religious, moral, and philosophical education) which was bullshit unless you wanted to hear the same rubbish about Christianity over and over again.

I would have loved to learn some actual stuff I would need instead of those classes, like what the hell taxes are or contraception more than just 'use a condom or you will get pregnant and die'

Maybe if these were taught in schools there would be less of them in problem form in adult life.

Right. But the problem is this.

Let's suppose, for the sake of argument, that the people upthread who believe most maths and science is a waste of time had their way, and state schools replaced all that book larnin' with "life skills". You can be absolutely certain that Eton will not follow in their footsteps, and the private schools would have to employ police guards to fend off the headlong rush of the middle-classes into their classrooms. Ten years later, there would be howls of outrage as not only Oxford, Cambridge, Durham and St Andrews became 100% private, but equally so did pretty well every STEM course at every university you've ever heard of, and quite a few you haven't.

Now you might be happy with that: non-academic educations for the many, leading to semi-skilled jobs, while we reserve all the professions for those whose parents can afford a decent education. But it's not necessarily the progressive answer, I feel.

There is a happy medium, of course, and the private schools have the advantage that most of their parents are invested in education and can also provide some of the "life skills" themselves. But remove academic content from state schools and you need to be very,. very careful that you aren't entrenching advantage.

We were taught in school about credit agreements and how much more you pay in total and the consequences of not keeping up. That's one PSE lesson. You can't live people's lives for them, you can make sure they have been exposed to certain ideas.

I was a subject teacher and did not join to be instructing children in things their parents should have taught them. What is the point of graduate level study to teach 'parenting skills', for example?

For my own children, I would not have wanted them to attend schools where these extras were not taken for granted.

If I wanted rigorous, higher level academic skills for my own two, it would have been patronising to expect the children of others to be taught at any lesser standard.

My mother and father had the parenting skills of gerbils but it was the academic teaching and high standards of my own schools which allowed me to succeed.

We were taught in school about credit agreements and how much more you pay in total and the consequences of not keeping up.

Borrowing money over 25 years at base+2%, secured on your house, to fund a world cruise for your family: probably a bad idea.

Borrowing money over 25 years at base+2%, secured on your house, to buy a house: in many if not most people's eyes, quite sensible.

Borrowing money over 25 years at base+2%, secured on your house, to buy the land you need to set up your unicorn and llama breeding business: tricky, and depends on a lot of stuff.

Same credit agreement. Different outcomes. A lot of teaching about the evils of debt is just that: teaching about the evils of debt. Debt is a tool which you can cut yourself with, like many others, and teachers are in general not the people to deliver that lesson.

Whenever there is an issue raised that is found to be causing a problem with young people schools seem to be expected to fix it. Parents can surely teach the skills mentioned e.g. budgeting by giving small amounts of pocket money for kids to learn what it means to save and spend. When I had problems with budgeting used to have a family conference in kitchen to explain X amount of money will not cover Y amount of spending. Kids all took part in decision on what we should cut back on or cut out.
There are only so many hours in the day for schools to teach major subjects. Parents have to be adults and recognise their responsibilities and stop acting like their children wanting everyone else to sort their problems.

YABVVVU

Cuboidal, it wasn't presented as the evils of debt particularly. Afai can recall and this was 25 years ago there were a couple of examples, one of someone successfully using credit to start out in life, one of someone overextending and getting in trouble.

Don't think that particular session went into mortgages, it was more from the point of view of car loans, credit purchases, the sort of thing that might be available to a recent school leavers in their first job.

If you can secure a loan on your house, you presumably already own the house and are earning enough - remortgaging for an experience holiday is not necessarily stupid either. One of the cheapest ways to borrow.

If the parents actually took responsibility and taught these basics, then we wouldn't need to!

I don't disagree in principle but I would question how effective some these classes are.

It sounds good teaching kids how to budget but what can you actual do in an hour? I remember we did an hour once at school and it was a complete waste of time.

Some things are better learned by experience. You learn budgeting by having your own money and running out of it. Some people never learn but if they don't learn when it is real money, I don't think messing around at school with a few counters at school could have helped.

We have the same crap at work. Resilience training last month.

YABU. Martin Lewis has fought hard and pledged thousands to help children be taught how to deal with insurance, debt, budgeting, saving etc.

I totally agree with him that kids need to be taught and need to understand these issues. Too many people live off their credit cards buying a lifestyle that they can't afford.

I was brought up that if you can't afford something you don't have it, you save for it, but too many people just bung it on a credit card and worry about it later. I have seen too many people get into debt or go bankrupt this way and it is shocking.

Kids leave school and never need half the maths that they learn again, but they will need financial skills thoughout their life. They need to learn about not getting into debt, and how to save money towards a mortgage, or budget their student loan etc.

First Aid should also be compulsary.

I was a subject teacher and did not join to be instructing children in things their parents should have taught them. What is the point of graduate level study to teach 'parenting skills', for example?

So why do schools teaching reading, writing, counting, etc., all of which could also be done by parents? Schools need to be a mix. They need to do the teaching that parents can't do, whether it be adding up, trigonometry, contraception, cooking or budgeting. Yes, there's a limit to the amount that schools can teach, but I think we need a radical overhaul of what's taught anyway. Eg VERY few people will need to know how to solve a quadratic equation, so why teach it to everyone. Very few people care about Shakespeare, so why is it compulsory to GCSE, when similar arts, music, drama etc is optional to GCSE stage surely Shakespeare should likewise be optional to for those who are interested?

Here's a link to an article in the Mirror that may be tabloid hype but is clearly expressing that too many people have either been unable to make good financial choices or have made some seriously bad ones and the impact on the economy could be bad.

www.mirror.co.uk/money/number-debt-ridden-brits-trouble-11419143

The people going through these really harsh experiences, like bankruptcy and homelessness, are probably not in a good place to teach their kids good financial habits.

Surely a lesson or two from the PHSE slot devoted to exploring the right questions to ask when making financial decisions will have a massive benefit for more than just the people hearing the talk.

I agree, OP. Which subjects shall we stop teaching in order to cover all these things?
None - many schools already cover some or all the topics - cover it in PSHE.

I don't think school's should be telling kids what they should do. That is for parents. Teachers should stick to facts but it is difficult these subjects.

You can teach kids about contraception but they shouldn't be told to use it because some parents don't believe in contraception. You can teach them about debt but not that they shouldn't get into it. Parenting is the best example of all that there is not a right way to do to.

I'm a bit uncomfortable with the state dictating to our kids how they should have sexual relationships, spent their money, bring up their children, what they should eat etc. I don't think it is their role.

Surely a lesson or two from the PHSE slot devoted to exploring the right questions to ask when making financial decisions will have a massive benefit for more than just the people hearing the talk.

I'd have thought finances would be better taught in Maths, well certainly the numbers side of it anyway. They already loosely "teach" things like simple and compound interest. Not really sure if schools/pupils really take PHSE all that seriously seeing as there are no exams, so no targets to hit. The whole "climate change" topic has been infiltrated into several subjects throughout the school years and rears it's head in GCSE questions, so surely finance related items could likewise be slotted in at various ages and in relevant subjects, time being found by taking out some of the less popular/less useful topics.

Not all parents/families have gardens.

YeH and contraception chat if left to my granny was none which meant also periods and things weren't discussed. That left my aunt at 10 very confused and in fear of dying when she started to bleed.

Let's not forget not all of us are lucky enough to have decent parents so there isn't a chance given to some kids to learn these life skills so school is the only place for it.

I'm grateful they do teach them and hope they continue to do so.

Educators are great at incorporating many subjects into a multidisciplinary curriculum. Contraception and gardening are practical expressions of biology. Budgeting is a practical expression of maths. Parenting and healthy relationship skills are part of psychology, sociology, history, culture and government. The more students can understand how abstract concepts are applicable to the real world the encounter, the easier it is for them to build upon the knowledge and experiences they have.

I don’t understand why you wouldn’t want your DC to be taught useful life skills?

While I think there is a lot of scope to teach lifeskills within the traditional subjects eg budgeting, loans , tax and interest in Maths, formal letter-writing in English it strikes me that loads of kids don't engage or remember what they are taught. Whenever say, a science item is discussed on MN you get loads of people saying they weren't taught it while others claim it was a basic curriculum item.