Things You Wish You'd Been Taught In School

[night-at-the-musian]

I wish more history had been taught outside of European and US American history.

Europe's "Dark Age" was the "Golden Age" for the Islamic world and India! There were grid layouts in Tenochtitlan! The richest person in the world was Mansa Musa, and I had to learn that at age 12 from Poptropica!

The history of the world is more varied and interesting than the regurgitated curriculum that I was taught growing up in the 2000s and 2010s. I really wish that at some point, our history courses chose other periods and locations to teach us about.

[petrichoran]

i wish i was taught about exercise in a way that wasn't "you HAVE to like this and do this or else". i hated gym class and it was the only class i almost got a b in in elementary school. i had a lot of [mostly undiagnosed] health problems that made movement hard, and the teacher didn't respect when i told her my doctor said not to do something, i guess she thought i was lying or exaggerating or something.

the thing is, when you got in trouble, you had to walk at recess, teaching us that exercise was a punishment. i was terrified of doing something wrong because i was afraid my friends would judge me, so i was terrified of exercise. that on top of gym class was just not good for my perspectives and i still struggle with motivation for exercise today. which is a pretty big problem, since obviously everyone needs it to be healthy and i especially do because of my disabilities.

the takeaway? better physical education. teach kindness. how to do things when you don't want to and how to make sucky things fun. i wanted to be taught along those lines, i guess. i don't know a clear answer of what i needed in that situation, but it obviously wasn't what i got.

[solbeth]

there are a couple of things i could have learned earlier and/or better at school:

first of all, i wish that the home economics had more emphasis put on them. in the entirety of highschool we cooked maybe once? and even then we were barely instructed on anything. as someone who grew up in a disfunctional household and had to learn how to take care of myself alone and later in life, from a social worker, i wish that school gave me more context regarding that.

second of all, i wish we learned about history from all around the world and how events back then influenced where we are standing now. i know that education in the US is very, well, local-centric. it has been similar in my Polish and later German school as well. only in later education have the history and politics of the world been touched upon more, but i feel like teaching younger kids about it would be greaty beneficial.

third of all, i feel like native language classes often test your reading comprehension, but do not help you train it at all. i feel like text analysis and interpretation is often associated with poems or classical prose, but it would be very useful to apply it to modern articles, news etc. as well.

[PurpleHello98]

(I didn't mean for this to be a thesis but it turned out that way because I really care about education! Which, I mean, you'd hope so, given I'm going to be a teacher.)

As a couple of people have already said here, I think there needs to be a bigger focus on literature/the classics. I was lucky enough to take AP Literature as well as AP Latin, so I got to read Emily Bronte, the Aeneid and other similar writings, but I think the classics from around the world are classics for a reason and they should be taught more. They're vessels that people have used for hundreds of years to understand the human condition, written by authors who knew humanity well. There should also be a focus on reading some multicultural literature, so students understand different culture. (And also because only ever reading American and a teeny bit of British literature can be really boring.)

But I think that above all, schools need to make sure students know how to read and write well! So many students are failed by the school system, and I've heard horror stories from teachers about administrations constantly promoting kids to the next grade level in a certain subject who don't get their current level, or are even two or three levels behind, just to avoid making the student feel bad. Even at the academically challenging high school I went to, I saw this. When my friends and I were juniors and seniors we still had some classmates (not so much me as I was always in AP English) who lacked relatively basic literacy and critical thinking skills for that age because our administration failed us sometimes on that front. (Not to mention the reliance on AI, plus a lot of social media is destroying students' attention spans and probably rotting their brains, but I digress.)

I wish more history had been taught outside of European and US American history.

[...]

The history of the world is more varied and interesting than the regurgitated curriculum that I was taught growing up in the 2000s and 2010s. I really wish that at some point, our history courses chose other periods and locations to teach us about.

This 100%! I honestly didn't even learn pretty much any European history at all beside a brief brushing-over of Columbus and a bit of pre-1776 Britain, and I guess the Industrial Revolution. I wish we had spent more time going over different history instead of taking three or four US history classes from elementary through high school that were basically teaching us all the same information. The only international history we learned at all were a tiny bit of Columbus and the Industrial Revolution, like I said, and my 9th grade world history class, which was literally just Mesopotamia and the Silk Road for 90% of the year. But maybe I just had a weird teacher?

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??

I think this is an amazing system! I'm glad to see that those schools still had math, science and that sort of typical school topics. I do think the way they're taught could use a good retooling, or teachers who are passionate about their subjects and school administrations who aren't too afraid of parents' backlash to enforce rules so those teachers don't lose their passion. (Can you tell I'm going to be a teacher? LOL)

But, despite the complaints of people who insist that teaching literature, the arts, foreign languages, science or whatever subject is "pointless" (pointless and not literally practical for every single day of your life are VERY different), I believe it's important to give kids a liberal arts education. If it's done right, it'll make them not just good at memorizing, but truly intelligent people. Students need to understand how the world works and be able to think for themselves. I especially believe in the benefits of learning a second or third language as a future French teacher. Studies show that, even if you live in a highly monolingual country, gaining proficiency in a second language improves the neural connections and plasticity in your brain!

So yeah, tl;dr is that I believe liberal arts, literacy, literature and languages are really important.