Things You Wish You'd Been Taught In School

[Gans]

Critical thinking. The sentence "Why should I believe that?" should follow every new topic appearing out there. Damm, this will become complicated in practise, but I guess if you dump half of the unecessary stuff from school, there should be room for more in-depth questions...

Also knowledge about all sorts of media. Make your own films. Manipulate photos! Give images a spin to make own propaganda to be able to decipher other's propaganda!

Psychology is like a magic science. I feel that brain/mind hacking/debugging would be too early for school kids. But with a high enough level of "wisdom", it's very important to be aware of these mind "game mechanics".

Speaking of mechanics, basic crafting skills. How to fix a bicycle tube. How to use a saw, etc. These things are universal things that everyone needs to be less dependant, no matter if you are going to become a doc or a grunt.

And basic Linux and Free Software to show the PC as the the powerful universal tool, that it can be FOR FREE, FOR EVERYONE. Fortuneatly the big companies are getting some backlash here in Germany. MS Office will be probably banned from schools.

[Cobra!]

I wish schools in my country taught our languages, Scots and Scottish Gaelic. For political reasons that's best not to get into, only English is taught and using Scots is actively discouraged, and seen as the language of nobodies and lowlives...

[Melooon]

I wish schools in my country taught our languages, Scots and Scottish Gaelic.

Its funny how contrarian life can be; in Ireland Gaelic is taught in every school and is very heavily encouraged (schools teaching exclusively in Irish get far more funding); but I can guaranteed that every school kid hates having to learn it and wishes it was not on the curriculum

[Cobra!]

Its funny how contrarian life can be; in Ireland Gaelic is taught in every school and is very heavily encouraged (schools teaching exclusively in Irish get far more funding); but I can guaranteed that every school kid hates having to learn it and wishes it was not on the curriculum

I heard about that. It seems like Ireland is taking all the right steps from what I can see, but people are resisting.
There have been other ex-UK countries that managed to get their native language replacing English. Most notably Malta. Before their independence, English was the most spoken language there, but now Maltese has taken over. Perhaps it's worth seeing how they achieved it.

[RodFireProductions]

But mostly school kids being spied on

We were actually spied on. They'd have those monitoring extensions installed on them so they could see our screens and even close our tabs. That's one of the reasons I started bringing my personal computer. Plus it allowed me to work on my development projects and play video games.

Imagine deciding to put everyone under monitoring instead of properly teaching them good "work" computer etiquette. All it did was make people sneakier. People learned that installing and using browsers that weren't Chrome allowed them to go unmonitored. The staff weren't even aware students could do that.

Meanwhile my school switched to GNU/Linux and LibreOffice in 2014.

No one I know uses LibreOffice but me. I did the switch and along with uninstalling all of the Microsoft Suite programs from my laptop when I first got it. My college lets us use Microsoft Suites for free, but I still refuse to do so.

[purelyconstructive]

I can identify with many of the replies here. Awhile back, I made a list about a similar topic (i.e.: what would be helpful to teach in school?). This is what it had on it:

• Hygiene, Nutrition, and Exercise
• Basic First Aid
• Mental-Emotional Self Management
• Goal Setting and Planning
• Study Techniques, Learning How To Learn
• Effective Communication Skills
• Ethics, Morals, Values
• Logical Reasoning, Spotting Fallacies
• Creative Problem Solving
• Homemaking (e.g.: Cooking) / Survivalism (e.g.: Foraging)
• Handling Common Tools (e.g.: the creation, maintenance, and repair of power generators, electrical appliances, and so on)

This list is not exhaustive, but all of these skills are immensely helpful on a day-to-day basis.

Depending upon the curriculum, these subjects are sometimes touched upon, but do not seem to be integrated into life in any meaningful way. I would even go so far as to say that schools are often structured in a manner that inhibits their assimilation.

[strwbtea]

- Good sex ed. There was so little told about e.g. hygiene and health and my only source was internet and girl magazines.
- Some sort of philosophy in high school
- More practical stuff like sewing, electrical work etc.

(I am from Poland)

[teatime]

We weren't taught how to use office suites nor did we ever use them. The only time I've seen those brought up is in college.

My high school actually had us all use Chromebooks, so Google stuff was what we had to use. Because of that, I actually not hate using the Google stuff and hate Chromebooks (both can be quite slow). I brought my own laptop to school my senior year because of how tired I was of it.

i feel like despite all of google's.... everything, chromebooks are being advertised as a cheap option for schools. i feel like the same could be said for those who use the google suite over word and the like: its cheap (free!) and anyone can use it :/

I wish schools in my country taught our languages, Scots and Scottish Gaelic. For political reasons that's best not to get into, only English is taught and using Scots is actively discouraged, and seen as the language of nobodies and lowlives...

same where i live. there are almost no fluent speakers of the native language and although we did have classes for that language, not a lot of us were encouraged to take it 

[Corrupted Unicorn]

I'm currently studying graphic design, 3D modelling and concept art for videogames. We're being taught the "industry standard", which is good so you know how to handle an actual job, but sometimes I wish they let us explore our artistic side more. Go beyond the industry standard. Things like maybe do a little claymation to experiment and not be so focused on a final grade. 

But yeah, that's my takeaway from this college and I guess you can apply it to school overall. They only teach you the "standard", but there's so much more to life beyond standard, and it's worth exploring 

[Guest]

I'm currently studying graphic design, 3D modelling and concept art for videogames. We're being taught the "industry standard", which is good so you know how to handle an actual job, but sometimes I wish they let us explore our artistic side more. Go beyond the industry standard. Things like maybe do a little claymation to experiment and not be so focused on a final grade. 

But yeah, that's my takeaway from this college and I guess you can apply it to school overall. They only teach you the "standard", but there's so much more to life beyond standard, and it's worth exploring 

My experience attending both college and university (I think they're considered the same thing in the states? not really sure how it's delineated down there) is that colleges are really focused on job training while universities are more about education itself. A lot of the job skills I have now I learned during my two year diploma course at college; but a lot of my critical thinking skills, impractical-but-interesting knowledge and otherwise human skills, I got from my time at university.

I think both approaches are valid as long as you know what you're signing up for, and I'm thankful I was able to experience both. I like being able to excel at my job but also being a well-rounded person.

[appleAlc]

I find it interesting that a lot of the stuff listed in here is what used to be home economics courses? I personally wish I'd gotten a chance to take it.
I really wish we got to learn Tsalagi or other languages that well. Are native to the area I live in and aren't English. It's a long shot to ever get anything like that done in public US schools in the South, but a girl can dream. French got cut due to budget constraints, and I think that's what happened to that Mandarin course just about everyone wanted to take, so I know Tsalagi would be a pipe dream.
I do wish we had more options in my time here, next schoolyear they're offering things like Music Technology & Appalachian Art & Journalism. It might just be that my year lost out on a lot of opportunity due to COVID, but it feels like we really got...screwed out of a lot of our high school education : (

[Swiftpaw]

I really wish we were taught about how to make websites with HTML/CSS sooner. I don't think HTML was ever explained to us in schools, and we didn't learn about it until we were an adult. There was a programming club at our school but it didn't really teach us any actual coding.

I'll also second what people said about life skills. Imagine if they actually taught you useful stuff that you might need as an adult like how circuit breakers, plumbing, outlets, and so on work and what to do if something trips or starts leaking. I kind of feel like people make fun of others for not knowing this stuff but the thing is unless your parents think to go out of your way to teach you you usually need to figure it out the hard way.

(Though school was 90% of how I learned how proxies and VPNs work because that was the only way to sneak around the website blocker. Our entire high school experience was us vs. the school firewall constantly updating workarounds.)

[Guest]

The thing is, school is a part of the economic system; it's supposed to prepare you for a job, not for life: the family is supposed to do that. Not defending it; it's just how it is conceptualized. School itself is a way for employers to outsource education and apprenticeships onto the taxpayer, historically speaking. School used to be much much shorter and a lot of what we now have in primary and secondary education used to be the stuff they'd teach you at work.

My experience is that if a school does go out of its way to teach all of these things, most people just don't listen or don't care to actually absorb the knowledge into their day-to-day knowledge. For example, we were taught how to do taxes, program in HTML and CSS to make our own website, how to stay safe on the web, philosophy, first aid; but nobody remembers it now because everybody just studied for the test and then forgot about it. Because it was school! People made fun of it, were inattentive, groaned about having to learn these things.

And I wasn't different; and I think that if school did teach all of these things, most of us would not have listened, either, because we were kids and paying attention in school beyond the test is

dumb and bad

.

[PurpleHello98]

More French! I went to a French immersion preschool/kindergarten from ages 4-6 but then they didn't have any more grade levels, so I had to go to an English-language school. At this point, I was literally fluent in French, but the English school still put me in baby's first French (C'est un chien. Le chien est rouge. Etc.) and so over the course of about nine years I lost so, so much of my French and only started getting back to somewhere close to proficiency (still not total fluency) in the past few years, in high school, and it's so disappointing that I lost so much of my French, though thankfully not all is lost. :)

[brisray]

I love this conversation. I like most of /home/user/'s reply, when you're young you do not have much of an idea what is going to become relevant or even really important later. My secondary school was good, we were taught a wide range of subjects and able to drop the ones we had no interest in or were bad at.

I haven't an artistic bone in my body, and know I missed out on learning more about art, music and languages.

Basic personal finance would have been good to know about, but the school was good on critical thinking exercises - What is the truth? How to tell it from something that looks plausible but is full of bias and misinformation. What is YOUR truth? Why is it sometimes different from other people's? Sometimes difficult to grasp when you're a teenager, but so useful later.

Can problem solving be taught? How to take what looks like a mess or just too big to cope with and split it down into smaller, more easily solvable problems. The cleverest people I know in any field can do that easily and seemingly inately.

"He should make a good workman" The words on the bottom of my dad's school leaving certificate from 1944. Hopefully we've come a ways from that.