British expat in the US here. I work in marketing for a tech company.
I was astonished that when someone suggested a rhyming couplet on one of our ads a) no one knew what a couplet was, and b) no one even understood the basic concept of meter.
Both those things are definitely covered in high school.
Whenever I see one of those “what would you tell your younger self / a younger generation to do” — definitely “pay attention to all your classes, it all becomes useful one day”
Yes even algebra. Yes even reading Of Mice and Men
Why are you using the word expat and not immigrant in the US?
a) because for this context where I’m from adds more context than where I went to
b) because immigrant in the US connotates South American heritage usually
School in Norway teaches you basic woodworking, how to cook and in math we even had an assignment where we had to find a job and create a monthly/yearly budget based on that job, taking into account loan from car, house, etc…
Does the US have nothing like that?
“Or life skills”, says the people who actively avoided Home Ec.
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.
Okay, but to be fair, school does not teach about taxes.
Probably because if they did, they would have a neverending supply of rebellious little adults on their hands, from either side of the political sphere.
This is not very helpful when you’re making little cog workers and soldier yes men.
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.
Ok, but like, what’s there ro teach specifically? If you know math it takes just a while to crank the numbers
