Our young adults have proven the current model of education simply isn’t working. Our young adults cannot even format their home address (a 3rd grade skill) and many high schoolers do not even know the months of the year in order. We missed something somewhere. Something has gone so wrong with our elementary education that its not recoverable by adulthood. Here’s my idea.
- Back to basics. We know what works, we’ve done it before. Reading, Writing, Arithmetic. Our kids can’t read. They can barely count money. What else do you want to teach them? They can’t learn anything else if they can read or do basic math.
- More music and art classes. We have a lot of neurodivergent kids in schools who perform better when the day is broken up more and the classes have more activity. Dyslexic children who are struggling to learn to read, suddenly learn to read when they learn to play an instrument. And kids who aren’t neurodivergent don’t really complain about getting out from behind that desk.
- Wait until 5th grade to add the socialization component to the curriculum. These kids need to learn to read before they start learning about all the other stuff. A basic, “be kind to people”, is enough at that age. Learning how to mind your business is also a life skill that is not being taught. The first thing a doctor learns is what a normal healthy body is supposed to look like and function like, then they learn about pathology, the symptoms, causes, treatments, and prognosis. Our kids need to learn what a healthy society looks like before they learn the anomalies and how to navigate them.
- High school should be centered on job development and life skills. Not all of us go to college or get a job that requires a degree. Every single one of us get a pay check, use the credit system, have a bank account, have opportunities to invest, use insurance, manage a household, raise children, have opportunities to start businesses, cook food, drive cars that require maintenance, live in homes that require maintenance. We can learn trigonometry in college, why waste these kids time learning a subject maybe one of them will ever use in their adulthood. Go to college to learn that. You need a degree for that job anyway. The teachers are already there.
- Include child development and parenting in the curriculum. Many children are abused or neglected, simply because the parent thinks the child is old enough for that or should be doing something its not developmentally able to do. Many of these students are raising sibling, or their own children. If we make sure these kids leave high school with a reasonable expectation of their children, we may be able to curb the generations of abuse and neglect.
- Add more health classes. This is the only body you’re ever going to have and we don’t even teach our kids how to take care of it. That’s absurd. Our kids should be leaving school with an idea of proper nutrition, basic to advanced first aid, the ability to read their own lab results, the ability call and make a doctors appointment, knowledge of the health insurance system, how to identify early signs of infection and what to do. Our young adults are ruining their credit on ER bills because they don’t know what to do about a sore throat. That’s not OK. They go to the ER like children going to their parents with a minor ailment. It’s just not fair to these guys to have them walk around so empty headed about their own body.
- Make Teachers Professional Again. When you walk in a classroom, you can’t tell the difference between the teachers and the students half of the time. Authority has a lot to do with appearance. If you don’t look like an authority figure, you wont be treated like one. That’s human nature and when your dealing with children who have not had the life experience to show them authority looks any way, you have to look like you have authority. Gen X remembers listening for the click of the heels when the teacher was coming back to class and getting back in their seat and tightened up. That authority came from her professional presence. I don’t know why they need jeans and a polo now. What are they doing? My teachers stood at the front of the class teaching, not rolling around on the floor.