Things You Wish You'd Been Taught In School

[Memory]

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 innately.

I think most of these things are learned through experience, though. I can't conceptualize a curriculum in school that could effectively teach a bunch of kids and teenagers how to, say, apply critical thinking. Absorbing knowledge into your day to day thinking patterns, and simply "learning" and being able to recall facts in a test, are two different things, and the latter is the default mode of acquisition in school.

I think school is just not that good of a setting to learn these things.

I mean, you got 20-40 young people in a room, most of who are just sitting here because they have to, trying to pay attention while their mind wanders elsewhere, and here you are as an adult trying to make them absorb entire thinking patterns into their day to day consciousness? Nah... Those things develop through experience: you can't teach me critical thinking by telling me about critical thinking, but making the experience of seeing yourself, or a thing you like, being misrepresented somewhere, can teach it to you very quickly.

I remember reading about a lovely park near my house in the newspaper, with people calling it a "crime, violence and drug hotspot", and almost falling over in my chair! It was anything but, it was actually a very nice place, only that there are a lot of immigrant-looking people there. They're just chilling there with their families talking and having fun, but for some reason the newspaper made it out to be a crime hotspot completely unjustly, probably due to racial prejudice. And once I understood that, I definitely don't trust most things people write about "problem areas" anymore until I have been there. Or take my degree; ever since I know a lot about linguistics, I see SO MUCH bad linguistics everywhere even in huge media, popular science and official communications that I just can't trust anything in areas I don't know about.

Some school settings and societies might alleviate these issues though simply by giving more opportunities to gain life experience during the formative years.
In East Germany for example, they had "polytechnical" schools. It was a unified ten-year school system where you:

(1) remained in the same class from elementary school ages all the way to graduation
(2) had a lot of classes about practical life and work-related skills, including the nominal polytechnical classes
(3) had one day a week of working an internship-like job in actual production, giving you plenty of opportunity to become independent and self-sufficient and become connected mentally to the real world, the worth of things, the experience of taking responsibility, social skills and much more
(4) learned your own regional dialect in addition to standard dialect, supporting regional minorities and endangered languages

Just look at these subjects: German, another foreign language, informatics/programming, maths, physics, chemistry, biology, arts and crafts/carpentry, economics, geography, astronomy, gardening, technical drawing, sewing, "Staatsbürgerkunde" (mostly how to do your papers, how to live properly, how to do taxes and so on), art, music... Plenty of things you don't get these days! Gardening?? Sewing?? Economics?? Crafting??

Everyone I know who grew up there had remarkable life skills at a very young age and was very happy with how they grew up in that respect, excepting of course personal problems with teachers, coworkers or classmates. All of this combined with lots of nature and handiwork related activities in the universal teen scouts made them into pretty well rounded people. I know none of them who can't repair a bike by themselves these days - I can't because nobody taught me to be good with my hands (even though I would have liked to). :(

[CATRA]

wish i had learned more about finances and dealing with ur money, thats a skill everyone should know and that isnt taught at all

[GHOUL]

i had a finance class that was required my senior year, and that was awesome! i think a lot of people talk about how they wish their school showed them how to do taxes so that is something for sure i can be grateful for. but i think it would be also helpful if we could also learn like... how to find a place to live... how to clean without gassing ur house... how often to change the filters in ur house... how to get groceries... stuff like that!! how to live on ur own and take care of urself!! i'm learning this kind of stuff for the first time and it would've been nice to get a primer lol!! ALSO?? study skills!! it's kind of silly that school never teaches how to study?? like how to take proper notes and retain information.. and then go over those notes!! i think i've struggled with that since i started school, and now i'm in college and it is WIPING ME OOOUUT!!

[akbatten]

I went to a college prep school, so I missed out on classes on trades like woodworking. Although looking at how the whole school system is structured, I can see why shop class wasn't a thing for us. You also can't offer a class that no-one signs up for. We didn't really have study skills, except for a few teachers who forced us to take notes and organize the binders in a specific way.

Too much focus on test scores instead of true performance. But then again how do you measure someones true understanding of something like chemistry without spending a ton of money? I can see how the school system gravitated towards tests and memorization.

[Memory]

Logical fallacies (seriously, it would save so many people from getting radicalized or falling for BS arguments if they actually knew about the slippery slope fallacy, I see that one getting thrown around all the time like it actually means anything and it annoys me to no end), sex ed/relationships (in particular, how to recognize abuse and unhealthy relationships, communication skills, etc.), really a lot of stuff related to mental health and emotional regulation too. The schools I went to always went on and on about the importance of physical health, but mental health, if it was ever mentioned, was only as a footnote like "hey take care of that too I guess."
Also, Mi'kmaq, the indigenous language of the region I grew up in! Our school had Mi'kmaq classes but they were only offered online and I'm pretty sure they cancelled those when less than like, a handful of students signed up or something (we were a small school I doubt many people ever signed up for those classes) and it was always an elective, which struck me as weird considering that that was the local Indigenous language. Like, I got forced into 7 years of mandatory French class (which I am grateful for, as my family is mostly French and I might not have learned it otherwise) but the actual native language to our region didn't get the same treatment.
Plus, more classes on like, life skills I guess? Like I got cooking class in middle school one year (it wasn't really a class, it was an after-school activity that most of us just went to for free food I think) and that would've been so helpful if I had gotten to attend it for more than like. A couple of Tuesdays towards the end of the year. Basic life skills like that would've been really nice to learn, especially before I became an adult and started feeling intensely anxious about how much I still don't know, lol.

[wygolvillage]

Definitely not the first person here to say "financial literacy"... I just shut down when I think about complicated paperwork and numbers and stuff and they just kind of toss you in the pool and expect you to know how to swim.

[JINSBEK]

Apparently kids these days don't understand folders because they just save things on their phone in that same cloud "black hole".

I can confirm. I tutor young adults who are just a few years younger than me (I was born in 2001, they were born in 2004+) and since most of them never grew up around forums, old game modding, having to fiddle with drivers, antiviruses, the registry and so on, and literally only had phones, tablets and maybe a laptop, they are unfamiliar with how to properly use a file system. For them, desktop computers feel like "work tools" to them like a printer, and not like an all-rounder that you spend your whole free time in front of. They don't have a concept of a file system beyond the very basics, don't know about file types or what they mean other than "pdf is a document", and so on. Some of them even struggled to follow an install wizard on Windows!

Oh god!! You mean we are gonna have spent our youths explaining computers to our parents and now we are gonna have to spend our old age explaining them to our kids This is actually a serious issue!

Hahaha! The lack of computer literacy is really an amazing thing, isn't it? But I also feel like it's not just a problem of, "Well, he doesn't know how to use a file tree, big deal?" but learning how to organise and index your own belongings is such an important skill to have. Broader and more complex organisational skills are ever-increasingly important to have in an increasingly complex society, so the loss of opportunity to exercise and develop these powers as a young person is, I think, devastating these days. You'll have poor relationships with everyone if you never learn how to prioritise effectively, for example. What's important, and to whom? When does something need to get done, and what is blocking another thing from being finished? When is it worth getting into an argument with someone, or are you just going to flail your arms and/or flounder all the time? And so on.

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

.

Right, this is an important point to remember. Ideally, parents should be taking the time to raise the children they birthed into confident, emotionally mature, capable adults. Conversations where questions are asked, including "What do you think is the right thing to do? How would you get there?", advice given, stories told about hard times and how your ancestors got through them, and of course exposure to extracurricular activities and community service. Stories are so important. Outsourcing the human process, of, well, raising someone to be human, to technology and glorified daycare has been very sad. I sympathise with all the people wishing school had taught them more basic human skills, and I do believe there is room for the introduction of and reinforcement of these foundations. But above all I think we should be holding parents accountable for this, not teachers. They already have their specific subject to focus on, which is a lot of work to do meaningfully and with depth and skill.

This is a good topic idea

We actually did have a computer class in school, but they just taught us how to make folders and put folders IN folders?? (omg that was an intense day).

I feel like as teenagers we would have mocked this idea mercilessly; but Id have loved a class that taught you how to build relationships and manage emotions - i.e. how to maintain friendships, getting along with parents, resolving arguments, making friends, working through grief etc - I think that would have helped a lot of people

Aside from that; we had a few classes about how to get a drivers licence and plan a holiday etc - but a proper class on how to do things like, how to do taxes, how to register with a doctor, how to buy insurance, how to shop smartly, how to vote and run for election, how and when to get legal advice etc.

I actually ended up learning a lot of these things from old films intended to be shown in US schools in the 1940s ... the info is solid.. if a bit out of date at times
How Do You Know It's Love? (1950)
Shy Guy (1947)
Your Thrift Habits (194:cool:

First, thank you for sharing those videos! They were lovely and enlightening. <3 We don't have films like that shown in the US nowadays, nor those topics brought up. I think nowadays, at least from what I've seen and experienced in the US, you're exposed to these only if you're lucky enough to have responsible parents who take the time to talk to you about these; go to some house of worship where these subjects get brought up and workshops are held for the laity; or you go actively searching for them in the library, YouTube, a podcast, Google, etc.

Grief is such an important topic, yet rarely seems to be discussed. Everyone will have at least one living being close to them die some day, and they too, will die. I think it's great that there's at least some children's and youth's stories that deal with this topic (The Little Prince, Old Yeller, All Dogs Go to Heaven, Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Sky, Persona 3) but those are very few and far in between, and generally don't deal with the reality of ageing, and unexpected widowhood. There's very little shared or discussed in school these days that help prepare children for the coming challenges they'll face as adults. I wish school education lent more focus on social and civic participation. I'm not sure if my generation would've laughed at these films--a lot of my peers come from very troubled families, and have moved to new towns and so on, so I think these lessons would've been really interesting to them. At least I personally take films that have a personal interest in my well-being more seriously than abusive, neglectful adults.

The subject I wish schools would teach more of are the questions brought up in the How Do You Know It's Love? (1950) video. These are very basic questions of premarital counselling (I can think of 30+ more that can and should be asked!), yet these aren't discussed very often, or only after it's "too late". What is the foundation of a loving, life-long partnership? And how do you not put yourself under so much pressure and hurry to commit, when you really shouldn't rush into things? (Or possibly, stay in things that won't lead to anything resilient, joyful, and loving in the long-term.)

I think most of these things are learned through experience, though. I can't conceptualize a curriculum in school that could effectively teach a bunch of kids and teenagers how to, say, apply critical thinking. Absorbing knowledge into your day to day thinking patterns, and simply "learning" and being able to recall facts in a test, are two different things, and the latter is the default mode of acquisition in school.

I think school is just not that good of a setting to learn these things.

I mean, you got 20-40 young people in a room, most of who are just sitting here because they have to, trying to pay attention while their mind wanders elsewhere, and here you are as an adult trying to make them absorb entire thinking patterns into their day to day consciousness? Nah... Those things develop through experience: you can't teach me critical thinking by telling me about critical thinking, but making the experience of seeing yourself, or a thing you like, being misrepresented somewhere, can teach it to you very quickly.

I remember reading about a lovely park near my house in the newspaper, with people calling it a "crime, violence and drug hotspot", and almost falling over in my chair! It was anything but, it was actually a very nice place, only that there are a lot of immigrant-looking people there. They're just chilling there with their families talking and having fun, but for some reason the newspaper made it out to be a crime hotspot completely unjustly, probably due to racial prejudice. And once I understood that, I definitely don't trust most things people write about "problem areas" anymore until I have been there. Or take my degree; ever since I know a lot about linguistics, I see SO MUCH bad linguistics everywhere even in huge media, popular science and official communications that I just can't trust anything in areas I don't know about.

Some school settings and societies might alleviate these issues though simply by giving more opportunities to gain life experience during the formative years.
In East Germany for example, they had "polytechnical" schools. It was a unified ten-year school system where you:

(1) remained in the same class from elementary school ages all the way to graduation
(2) had a lot of classes about practical life and work-related skills, including the nominal polytechnical classes
(3) had one day a week of working an internship-like job in actual production, giving you plenty of opportunity to become independent and self-sufficient and become connected mentally to the real world, the worth of things, the experience of taking responsibility, social skills and much more
(4) learned your own regional dialect in addition to standard dialect, supporting regional minorities and endangered languages

Just look at these subjects: German, another foreign language, informatics/programming, maths, physics, chemistry, biology, arts and crafts/carpentry, economics, geography, astronomy, gardening, technical drawing, sewing, "Staatsbürgerkunde" (mostly how to do your papers, how to live properly, how to do taxes and so on), art, music... Plenty of things you don't get these days! Gardening?? Sewing?? Economics?? Crafting??

Everyone I know who grew up there had remarkable life skills at a very young age and was very happy with how they grew up in that respect, excepting of course personal problems with teachers, coworkers or classmates. All of this combined with lots of nature and handiwork related activities in the universal teen scouts made them into pretty well rounded people. I know none of them who can't repair a bike by themselves these days - I can't because nobody taught me to be good with my hands (even though I would have liked to). :(

You raise an important point. Rote memorisation isn't useful here, and experiences are the best teachers--though stories from veterans and mentors, and questions exchanged between each other, help. I love your anecdote about your East German acquaintances! I have a somewhat related note to share. The National Film School in Lodz, Poland, also an Eastern Bloc country, was amongst the finest in the world in that era. Its five-year programme gave not only the practical training of editing and camera operation, but also demanded courses in the history of art, literature, music, optics, the theory of film direction. It is such that the filmmakers who graduated out of such schools, when coming to Hollywood, would always astonish their American crew with knowledge of and exacting camera requirements, and the precise understanding of the optics and geometry and lenses. Roman Polanski is the most famous of these. I am not aware of any American film schools that train filmmaking in such a holistic way, even though Hollywood takes centre stage in world cinematic production.

[candycanearter07]

Hahaha! The lack of computer literacy is really an amazing thing, isn't it? But I also feel like it's not just a problem of, "Well, he doesn't know how to use a file tree, big deal?" but learning how to organise and index your own belongings is such an important skill to have. Broader and more complex organisational skills are ever-increasingly important to have in an increasingly complex society, so the loss of opportunity to exercise and develop these powers as a young person is, I think, devastating these days. You'll have poor relationships with everyone if you never learn how to prioritise effectively, for example. What's important, and to whom? When does something need to get done, and what is blocking another thing from being finished? When is it worth getting into an argument with someone, or are you just going to flail your arms and/or flounder all the time? And so on.

Right, this is an important point to remember. Ideally, parents should be taking the time to raise the children they birthed into confident, emotionally mature, capable adults. Conversations where questions are asked, including "What do you think is the right thing to do? How would you get there?", advice given, stories told about hard times and how your ancestors got through them, and of course exposure to extracurricular activities and community service.

Grief is such an important topic, yet rarely seems to be discussed. Everyone will have at least one living being close to them die some day, and they too, will die. I think it's great that there's at least some children's and youth's stories that deal with this topic (The Little Prince, Old Yeller, All Dogs Go to Heaven, Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Sky, Persona 3) but those are very few and far in between, and generally don't deal with the reality of ageing, and unexpected widowhood.

Yeah, I find the whole computers becoming a black box to be infuriating. I get the whole "keeping things simple and secure", but it feels like that is ALL that device manufacturers care about nowadays. It really does feel like every device is becoming a chromebook, "secure", sure, but you are physically prevented from accessing anything beyond the basics. I'm personally incredibly thankful I got a raspberry pi as a kid, since that let me tinker and learn about computer stuff without making it too much of a loss if I destroyed something. I really really wish that more effort was put into making computers modular, repairable, and open rather than abstracting everything away.

I agree, but I did not have that kind of parents myself. Probably why I'm such a disaster with any kind of socializing.

I sincerely hope no kid played Persona 3. On a more serious note, I absolutely agree about the "grief should be normalized" thing. PMD made me cry as a child.

[Capybara]

By the time I was in middle school, home economics and shop classes were phased out by Dubya's No Child Left Behind act. I also was transferred to a shitty charter school that was in a church due to bullying, which you can imagine how efficient its teaching was. I wish the schools I went to in the 2000s focused on teaching life skills for adulthood than focusing on memorizing shit to pass standardized testing. Teach kids how to manage money, pay taxes (taxes are easy but I still didn't know until I did it), cook food, repair everyday objects, and other skills that would actually help in adult life.

Oh, and maybe the kids now could benefit from an online safety course so they won't air out their dirty laundry on Tiktok...

[JINSBEK]

Yeah, I find the whole computers becoming a black box to be infuriating. I get the whole "keeping things simple and secure", but it feels like that is ALL that device manufacturers care about nowadays. It really does feel like every device is becoming a chromebook, "secure", sure, but you are physically prevented from accessing anything beyond the basics. I'm personally incredibly thankful I got a raspberry pi as a kid, since that let me tinker and learn about computer stuff without making it too much of a loss if I destroyed something. I really really wish that more effort was put into making computers modular, repairable, and open rather than abstracting everything away.

Right? And friction can be good actually. The way kids are growing up on platforms with in-app "Bookmarks" that don't allow for any organisation is actually very worrying to me. Simple organisational skills like that--what do you save, where do you put it away, what subfolders do you make and how do you navigate this--are essential for knowledge-based jobs. Which, increasingly, are what these kids are trying to aim for. But they can't organise a simple file tree. How are they supposed to manage a complex job in an increasingly complex economic/production system? I was the kind of kid who opened up the family Xbox 360 for fun (my dad didn't like that, but I didn't break anything), and I think tinkering like that has given me a greater appreciation for everything I encounter. The sheer logistics and intricacies and dependencies of it all. It's fun, and I get less frustrated by things when they break, because I don't feel "completely clueless" about its operation, even if I am.

Oh, and maybe the kids now could benefit from an online safety course so they won't air out their dirty laundry on Tiktok...

I don't think kids should even be on TikTok! The hell are these parents on?! But yeah. Priiiiivacy. In my day every freakin' TV commercial emphasised, "Ask your parents permission before going online! To our totally kid-friendly, kid-oriented website about a cereal brand!" Man. Postopia. The kids these days will never know... ...And frankly it seems like the parents don't care about what they kids say, see, or do. Damn.

[candycanearter07]

Right? And friction can be good actually. The way kids are growing up on platforms with in-app "Bookmarks" that don't allow for any organisation is actually very worrying to me. Simple organisational skills like that--what do you save, where do you put it away, what subfolders do you make and how do you navigate this--are essential for knowledge-based jobs. Which, increasingly, are what these kids are trying to aim for. But they can't organise a simple file tree. How are they supposed to manage a complex job in an increasingly complex economic/production system? I was the kind of kid who opened up the family Xbox 360 for fun (my dad didn't like that, but I didn't break anything), and I think tinkering like that has given me a greater appreciation for everything I encounter. The sheer logistics and intricacies and dependencies of it all. It's fun, and I get less frustrated by things when they break, because I don't feel "completely clueless" about its operation, even if I am.
I don't think kids should even be on TikTok! The hell are these parents on?! But yeah. Priiiiivacy. In my day every freakin' TV commercial emphasised, "Ask your parents permission before going online! To our totally kid-friendly, kid-oriented website about a cereal brand!" Man. Postopia. The kids these days will never know... ...And frankly it seems like the parents don't care about what they kids say, see, or do. Damn.

Yeah, PLUS all the sandboxing that phones do. It is VERY frustrating having each program have its own (unorganized) storage, and having to "export" files between them. It feels like they're scared to have any glimpse of the underlying system, especially with how almost no programs give a "open" menu anymore on mobile. It ONLY reads from the folder its designated to..
Also, it feels like most stuff now is designed to break if you try to do anything that it wasn't specifically programmed to do. And even if you don't, sometimes a corporate moron messes up the DRM server and oops now you can't play a single thing on the console you bought.

Yeah, no kidding. Give em an inch..

[Rosaria Delacroix]

I broadly think that I had the privilege of attending decent schools- and even got to take some outlandish elective courses that were not at all part of the standard courses for most highschoolers.

There's two that I think people would broadly benefit from, and one that is more of a niche.

I think that my Writer's Craft course massively improved my skills with literary analysis and composition, in addition to teaching time management, self motivation, and accountability. The workshop class I took was a great crash course in WHMIS (Workplace Hazardous Materials Information System) safety standards, respect for tools and machinery rather than fear or cocky disregard, how to bring something from a concept to actualization while working in close proximity to others where you absolutely needed a strong awareness of what was around you, and to be able to effectively communicate to keep everyone safe. My independent mock-thesis course was also super valuable in a more niche way: it prepared me beautifully for university, and learning how to use databases, hold a longer seminar than I ever would in my undergrad, create slidedecks and a research proposal as well as an actual 'publication worthy thesis paper,' which was incredibly challenging, but made my research papers in university a breeze.

The required English courses are largely geared to making sure you can read and write at a competent, functional level. It eschews the beauty in craft, and they focus more so on clarity of communication: which is very important, don't get me wrong- but so many people walk away thinking it's all kind of a drag. Being able to clearly communicate what parts of, and why works of writing moved me emotionally was such a big breakthrough- to be able to have the language to dissect and recreate, gaining a deeper appreciation and understanding of the works and the authors behind them.

We were pushed to produce pieces for group assessment on a frequent basis, and constructive criticism was expected: both to be given politely, and handled with grace. I grew massively as a creative from the concrit alone. The exposure to a wide variety of fellow writers and their stylistic choices was really formative- while I may not be particularly fond of like, Westerns, it was still inspiring to see someone incredibly devoted to their niche. Being pushed outside of our pet comfort zones, and encouraged to experiment with different genres and mediums was also super valuable- I don't write screenplays, but you learn a hell of a lot about dialog and when to 'tell, not show' to counterbalance the lush florid prose of the Gothic.

The workshop class was one I sort of ended up stuck in for the credit, because that was a semester where all of the other arts courses were full up. I gained a lot of confidence in the class- you couldn't be afraid of the machines. You learned how to safely handle them, how to inspect and report any potentially dangerous flaws, how to measure twice and cut once, going from drafting plans to actually holding a perfectly finished off soldered metal trinket box or smooth as sin wooden puzzle set, and how to protect yourself from the shavings of plexiglass, handle the heat of welding, how to safeguard your lungs against resin and harsh solvents, and how to read safety materials sheets, among other countless hazards. I was a timid little kid- but you had to be loudly outspoken, to avoid bumping someone into a circle saw, and working with your hands and realizing you were totally capable and competent, as long as you took reasonable precautions, was really a big point of growth for me. It also was weirdly excellent practice for chemistry labs I would later go on to do, where we'd be juggling around jars of sulphuric acid or playing around with dimethyl sulfoxide.

The mock thesis course was intense- you were given free reign on the topic, a crashcourse in how to use databases to look up scholarly research, and set off to the races. It was entirely self paced, (with occasional structuring of both soft and hard deadlines, with rough draft check-ins and presentations), and I'm still proud of the paper I wound up writing for that class. Some of the things I learned in it would seep into my research papers in university, and through a longwinded, convoluted story- the research I did for that class as a sixteen year old, would go on to save my older brother from completely losing his hearing when I was twenty four, due to a rare complication of medication he was put on, that his doctors completely missed the first time around, only to blow his phone up immediately after they went and looked up the syndrome I kept insisting he needed to get help for. So for that alone- I am incredibly grateful that I took that class. Funny how life has such wild butterfly effects sometimes.

[MatherBoing]

Useful things. How to pay taxes, how to type on keyboards without looking, and a financial class. A class where they teach you how to spend your money (carefully), as well as how to save it and still have a little left, and how to keep good credit. That's what I think they should teach.

I also have a good concept for a "Life Class".

    Basically, there's a big room (not too big, this is only a classroom), and the teacher is the government. Students are assigned jobs like bankers, cashiers, civilians, police, etc, and you simulate life. You get paychecks of Monopoly money, and you spend the money for food and other expenses, and there are big desks around the room (used to simulate the front desk or customer service at a restaurant or something), and you can buy food, and/or ask for services depending on the type of organization. And yes. There are taxes, there is jail, and there are jail sentences depending on what crime you committed. And you can't forget the jury!
    Every week, there is an election. Students can run for president, and the class has a majority vote. Whichever of the 2 candidates wins, wins. There is a 2 week limit to how long you can be president, and the president can alter the laws, and police enforce them (only the original 27 constitutional amendments). And there is an Executive, Legislative, and Judicial branch where people are tried and stuff.

That's it. That's my concept. You function as a society to feel what your future will be like. Anyway, it's more of a fun little elective.

[candycanearter07]

Useful things. How to pay taxes, how to type on keyboards without looking, and a financial class. A class where they teach you how to spend your money (carefully), as well as how to save it and still have a little left, and how to keep good credit. That's what I think they should teach.

I also have a good concept for a "Life Class".

    Basically, there's a big room (not too big, this is only a classroom), and the teacher is the government. Students are assigned jobs like bankers, cashiers, civilians, police, etc, and you simulate life. You get paychecks of Monopoly money, and you spend the money for food and other expenses, and there are big desks around the room (used to simulate the front desk or customer service at a restaurant or something), and you can buy food, and/or ask for services depending on the type of organization. And yes. There are taxes, there is jail, and there are jail sentences depending on what crime you committed. And you can't forget the jury!
    Every week, there is an election. Students can run for president, and the class has a majority vote. Whichever of the 2 candidates wins, wins. There is a 2 week limit to how long you can be president, and the president can alter the laws, and police enforce them (only the original 27 constitutional amendments). And there is an Executive, Legislative, and Judicial branch where people are tried and stuff.

That's it. That's my concept. You function as a society to feel what your future will be like. Anyway, it's more of a fun little elective.

My high school actually did that for a project, sorta. It was more about running a "business" and part of it was actually creating a product and "selling" it. I think there was also a war that happened through a really big DND battle. I really didn't like it because I'm especially bad at talking to people, and my friend kinda screwed me over, but it was a really cool idea.

[crazyroostereye]

Basically, there's a big room (not too big, this is only a classroom), and the teacher is the government. Students are assigned jobs like bankers, cashiers, civilians, police, etc, and you simulate life. You get paychecks of Monopoly money, and you spend the money for food and other expenses, and there are big desks around the room (used to simulate the front desk or customer service at a restaurant or something), and you can buy food, and/or ask for services depending on the type of organization. And yes. There are taxes, there is jail, and there are jail sentences depending on what crime you committed. And you can't forget the jury!
    Every week, there is an election. Students can run for president, and the class has a majority vote. Whichever of the 2 candidates wins, wins. There is a 2 week limit to how long you can be president, and the president can alter the laws, and police enforce them (only the original 27 constitutional amendments). And there is an Executive, Legislative, and Judicial branch where people are tried and stuff.

I have heard of something similar of it before, sadly can't remember where.

I don't think how well it would work, as I can't imagine meany People especially in the teenage Years will care for Play Pretend. And wouldn't show any interest.

In my Opinion the best way to teach Kids Politics and Responsibility, is to actually give them that ability. Create Student Counsel that actually carry Power. Make the Counsel responsible for school rules, scheduling to certain extent, after school activities and events. This gives the Responsibility and not have them play pretend as the things they are doing does matter. And most Importantly don't heavily oversee them. Make basically everything except the Classes themselves be managed by a Student Body.

In my School we had a school student counsel that nobody cared for, as the Teachers and Parents Counsel oversaw and overreached every time they were doing something. That aforementioned Parents Counsel for example canceled my Years Finals Celebrations as they were Butt hurt that we were complaining about they're Ludacris and out of touch Safety Rules. Yes it was just after Covid and there were still mandates in place. But not a single time a Parent in the counsel had the Idea to ask the Students what they want and what is important to them. None of the Parents of that counsel were even Parents of Students of that year. That perticular year we also didn't have counsel because of COVID. And the best thing, we didn't get our Money back. That were 50€ each down the drain.


You might notice I am still a bit Butt hurt.