The Onion

You're putting a lot of the onus on the student, when often times it's the state. I went to a high school that should have had 2000 students but actually had 3000. So crowded we all abandoned going to lockers between class in order to make it on time, and just carried full backpacks all day. Most classes had too many students for the teachers to really help actually teaching at.

That last statement came from one of my teachers, so happy she had one of the few classes with around 20 students instead of 30 plus. It was a world history class, and still the one I recall the most, more than 20 years later. She had the option to work directly with us on stuff we didn't understand, and had more interactive classes (like having students with specific relations to civil rights type stuff discuss their experiences in front of the class).

When you're an exhausted kid being taught by an exhausted teacher who can't even check up if you're falling behind, you don't retain much.

Full agreement. As a kid I didn’t really understand that the goal was to make me a well rounded adult with a wide variety of knowledge to pull upon if needed.

And also more than any other classes math and English are about teaching you different ways to think. Algebra is applied logic and I use it on a regular basis, sure not on a whiteboard that often (though I do that too) but in my budget, in taxes, in how I approach problems

What is a couplet?

You guys are getting Home Ec.?? All we got was HTML and Latin... unless you count that carpentry class they offered in middle school where the teacher got in trouble for ogling the girls...

Home ec was completely gutted by the time I got to middle school. Really wasn't very useful for teaching "life skills". Also who thought that should be a middle school class? Budgeting should be a topic for when you actually have some kind of income, and I sure as hell didn't have one in middle school.

The important thing to realize here is that "does the US..." is almost a meaningless category to ask about (at least as far as education is concerned), because each of the 50 different states manages its schooling requirements very differently. Potential course offerings and curriculum are often completely the authority of the individual school districts. So it's almost impossible to ask any given sweeping generalization question about the US school system.

Canada.

In grade school (grade 6 I think) I recall an assignment where we got assigned a job from a card deck and had to build a budget to live on with it, had to consider upkeep and the like too.

For highschool, Tech classes were mandatory in grade 9 but I took woodshop and comp sci for as long as I could, dropping woodshop in the upper years.

Grade 10 had a split course, 1/2 was economics, did mock job applications and budgeting, the other half waa civics where we learned about the Westminster system and how our system differs from the states. That one sticks out even 18 years later as the teacher actually pushed critical thinking and encouraged constructive discussion.

I wish civics was taught for longer, there are far too many Canadians who don't understand our system, side effect of bordering a country 10x your size with a massive global presence. I know a lot of people who only consume US news media and have no clue what's happening on their side of the fence

Ours had all of that. I think many of the bad things you hear about US education is mostly a concerted narrative to try to denigrate the importance of publicly funded schools. IE to reduce funding and line private schools pockets.

I went to school in a rural part of a blue state and I had a similar experience to you. Woodworking and cooking were options but they were electives.

One of my high school math classes had a similar career and budgeting project. Most kids didn't take it seriously. Like teenagers tend to do because they're annoying teenagers.

Just speaking of my own experience, woodworking and cooking were optional. A class where you have to do that whole exercise of finding a job, learning how to budget for a car and house was mandatory. There were a few different classes that did that, but you had to take at least one of them.

Outside of the traditional classes (math, reading/writing, history, science, other languages), we had a few levels of woodworking, cooking, childcare, electronics, auto working, ceramics, painting, "technology", music, and probably a couple more categories. There obviously isn't enough time in the day to do all of them, so you'd have to prioritize.

Came in to say something similar.

Another issue is that people don't remember anything from school because they have no reason to. Stuff isn't taught, it's trained for the next test and then promptly discarded as useless. The purpose of school is to train factory line workers to be able to do one repetitive task over and over again. It's how the public school system was originally designed.

School almost made me hate learning, and I love learning new things and skills. I literally never learned how to actually learn and be afraid to make mistakes until after I dropped out of college. I still struggle with it in my 30s.

Well if the kids end up restless add another class about the political system and how to effectively participate at the local, state, and federal... oh.

Why would knowing about taxes a few years earlier make you rebellious?

My school did(or supposed to) teachuse about taxes

How tax brackets work, for one. I've seen so many bad takes from people who clearly don't understand them.

A home econ class or hell even a math class could assign everyone some facts about their fictional situation (like a w2, number of kids, house payments, donations, etc) and then have everyone do their taxes for the year.

You'd teach the process. And spend some time looking at the tax table. Learning about standard deduction, learn about turning your taxes in on time.....

Also, if we're going to spend political capital on this, it should be spent on having tax filing be free and automatic. They know how much you made. It can all be done for you with essentially zero effort, and you just need to confirm it. Sadly the companies selling software make a good chunk of cash from this not being done.

You can teach critical thinking with almost any topic, but I'd say understanding tax system in the place you live should be very important.

Btw why not simplify AND teach taxes in schools?

Reforming the federal tax system is an all or nothing proposition in the sense that any change however small would apply to the entire country. Changing the education system can be done district by district. You could go to your school board meeting and advocate for this and it could be put in place relatively quickly, compared to changing the federal system.

IMO it's not about memorizing every lesson as much as it is conceptualizing and appreciation core concepts.

Isn't that every class in school?