To think we should teach kids about mortgages and pensions instead of making them do Maths till 18?

[malificent7]

Never have i had to work out the area of a triangle since school so why isn't Sunak proposing we teach kids proper life skills instead? My dad never taught me and would have been better placed lecturing me on mortgages than harping on about pythagoras ( again...never used).

YANBU. Yhe curriculum is sonout of date. Why on earth is English literature a compulsory GCSE but history isn’t - is fiction really more important than fact? And why can’t schools teach first aid and mortgages?

My dds high school have started a lesson called money matters, it's 6 lessons so not many but the kids learn the basics about savings and interest rates in year 7 through to borrowing, and managing money on a larger scale as well.
They started this last year, the modules change every six weeks so they cover careers, money matters, mental health, rse, life skills and a 6 th one that I can't remember ATM.
It's not much but with so many other subjects to cover it's enough to begin with.
Too many expectations are placed on schools and not parents in my opinion.

Oh and first aid is definitely covered in schools, it's been a requirement since a couple of years atleast.
They do the British red cross first aid champions program.

I’d be sparing with your use of the word ‘dumb’ if I were you. That’s not what she said.

Explanation:

The original poster said, why should her boyfriend, a teacher, be forced to teach pupils to understand financial products, because why couldn’t parents teach them those things themselves. No skin in the game there, then. You’ll remember that the subject of the thread is, paraphrased, if kids are going to be taught maths in some form until the age of 18, should some of that teaching cover mortgages and pensions?

The poster whose response you called ‘dumb’ pointed out the logical flaw in the original poster’s argument, which is, if your argument is “why should teachers teach X [where X is any topic], the parents should be doing it”, the same rather weak argument could be extended to any other topic, especially those areas of knowledge less frequently used.

Which, as you note, would be to everyone’s detriment, but the second poster is absolutely not saying, “we should only teach basic maths skills that everyone uses regularly”.

Or we could just teach the "harder" Maths to those likely to use it, and concentrate school/teaching time on what the other pupils are actually able to understand/do and use! At the moment less than half of school leavers are numerate, so there's zero point in trying to teach them pythagoras etc if it's something they can't do and never will until they learn and can do the basics.

Kids also roll there eyes when they are taught math,history, english ect. They teach sex ed in middle school and kids just turn that into a joke. Point is I agree that they should teach kids at some level about mortgage, debt, APR, first time home buying ect. This can easily be rolled into a math class.

You don’t need math to know anything about investing or pensions. Why just pensions? Parents should teach their kids about investing. It’s not up to the teachers though.

Math a core subject and should be taught all the way though to 18. British kids are already disadvantaged in literacy and math compared to the rest of the G20. How uncompetitive do you want the future of Britain to be?

If a parent wasn't taught pensions and hasn't learned about them, how are they expected to teach them to their kids?

Again, why shouldn't parents teach their kids pythagoras, why should it be teachers who do it?

I think we need a radical re-think of what's taught at schools and how it's taught. The World has changed over the past 40 years since I was at school, but the teaching my DS has just had was VERY similar to mine 40 years ago in terms of methods of teaching, subject content, etc. Go into a school and it's as if time had stood still, whereas outside schools, things are virtually unrecognisable.

I used to educate teenagers on this in schools as part of the PSE programme. Quite an eye opener for some of them! We used to calculate the compound interest on store card purchases etc, and see how much extra it cost versus saving up to buy the item outright.

IMO it's quite reasonable to expect maths teachers to teach Pythagoras theorem. It is also reasonable to expect a tradie like a carpet fitter or tiler, to explain how it works when fitting flooring. They may not know what it's called in maths but they use the principles and apply the rules every single working day. And the good ones can do the calculation by eye and in their head. They don't have to write it out.

I think we need a radical re-think of what's taught at schools and how it's taught. The World has changed over the past 40 years since I was at school, but the teaching my DS has just had was VERY similar to mine 40 years ago in terms of methods of teaching, subject content, etc. Go into a school and it's as if time had stood still, whereas outside schools, things are virtually unrecognisable.

I am really confused by this. Having retrained as a primary school teacher a few years ago, schools bear very little resemblance to my own primary schooling! Real-world, modern skills are most definitely being taught and teaching methods are completely different due to the amount of research and level of expectation and CPD.

*If a parent wasn't taught pensions and hasn't learned about them, how are they expected to teach them to their kids?

Again, why shouldn't parents teach their kids pythagoras, why should it be teachers who do it?*

Because pensions are part of everyone's life, like cooking. It's easy enough to educate yourself in these areas of life.

Pythagoras ans Algebra are not part of life but rather they stretch your mind and teach you how to think.

But they are Maths 🤷🏽‍♂️

Alain de Botton has set up the brilliant ‘School of Life’, which takes the great works of literature and philosophy and applies them to ordinary living. It’s such a good idea. Children ought to be taught how to navigate sex, pornography, relationships, work, money, debt, depression, loneliness, bereavement, etc. They should be taught how to process and manage their emotions, how to cope with trauma, and how to support others through such things.

Most of that is parenting though. Schools are not there to be parents.

So why do schools teach cooking and not pensions?

Without basic maths they wouldn't be able to understand mortgages. I think the emphasis though is that all children should enter adulthood having had the opportunity to learn basic skills so that they are proficient in 'functional skills' eg calculating a utility bill. Many teachers do use realise examples.
BTW if you were to go into engineering you will inevitabley use trigonometry even for example a simple milling exercise...I'm not talking to shot designers and certified engineers, I mean machinists.
Nothing to stop parents to teach these skills though.

I never understand this, all the maths for pensions, mortgages, budgeting is already in the curriculum and I’m sure lots of teachers cover it functionally - I know mine did. In addition to this the money saving expert website is excellent for adults. I honestly think some people just like to be helpless so they can blame others.

Pensions, mortgages etc are literally just percentage growth and reduction - I think that’s year 7 isn’t it? Budgeting is adding and subtraction covered by year 4 up to 1000s.

I home educated for a while so still in with the community even though my daughter's gone to school. There are groups set up to teach this stuff and I'll be getting her into those to be honest. I know the basics but they run little courses. School should be I think they could if they wanted to, it's obviously not something that's a priority. I mean mistakes in those areas are lucrative for those in charge, and those in charge are in charge of education policy.

My Dad left the local village school at 14 in the mid 1930s. I imagine anything he was taught there would be more arithmetic than mathematics. He did an apprenticeship which led to a job in the building trade, which he then worked in all his life (well apart from 5 years fighting in WW2).

When I was a teenager in the 1970s I was once helping him build a wooden hen house in the back garden. As he arranged the timbers for the base of the hen house he was explaining to me the importance of ensuring that anything you built had "square" corners. It was apparent from the context that what he called square corners was what I had been taught was a right angle, or 90 degrees. He then went on to say that a handy tip he had been told years ago was that if he measured three feet down from the corner on one side and made a mark, then four feet down the other side and made a mark, the distance between the two marks should be five feet if it was a square corner.

Of course, as a mathematically inclined, geeky teenager I recognized Pythagoras Theorem and told Dad I knew this from school and went on to describe to him as much as I could remember. My Dad had never heard of this before and was quite chuffed that a handy and practical technique he had been using all of his professional life on building sites had such an impressive name!

THIS

You can teach both. It's not as if it's mutually exclusive and kids' brains would run out of space

I would be surprised if I have never had to work out the area of a triangle. I have certainly had to work out the area of a circle several times, mainly for baking purposes. For example, I once had a pizza recipe that said it would make two 10-inch pizzas. However, I didn't want 10-inch pizzas I wanted little 7-inch pizzas for the freezer. I needed to know how many 7-inch pizzas that amount of ingredients would make, hence I deployed the area of a circle formula. And yes, I know that pizzas are, strictly speaking, 3D not 2D but near enough 2D that it still works!

Similarly if I am making a pie but the size of my pie dish is different to the recipe then I will use area of a circle to work out how much pastry I need then calculate volumes for the pie filling.

Moving away from area and more in to simple equations then these are also deployed often in cooking. Typically on something like a Chinese ready meal where there may be 2 or 3 mains, rice and starters all taking different times. So, for example, if the time you will eat the main course is 'm' and you have one that takes 30 minutes and one taking 20 minutes and the rice takes 25 minutes then they go in the oven at m-30, m-20 and m-25. However, you also have starters which take 15 minutes so they go in at s-15. But it will take you 10 minutes to eat starters so s = m-10. Then when the oven has reached temperature you have to solve it all to find out what time you will be eating. Or from the other way round figure out when you want to eat then work out when to start cooking.

Doesn't everyone do it like that!

I went to a private school and all that was covered in Social Sciences, including how to read a set of accounts and a P&L. I also use the Maths I was taught at school every day of my life. And builders use trigonometry all the time.

Some modules on critical thinking and techniques of misinformation would be handy too.

My husband always voted Conservative until our children asked him why and openly mocked his meaningless slogan like answers.

(The kids got an education on misinformation during the Brexit campaign.)

I think we'd have a healthier political debate and a better country if more people weren't so easy to manipulate, derail with whataboutery, and knew the difference between a valid argument and a meaningless slogan.