Yeah. English, history and the like are teaching critical thinking, media literacy and even stuff like empathy.
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The core classes I had at college absolutely failed to teach me any useful life skills. Your typical 18 year old isn’t getting anything at all out of freshman English or intro to US history at large universities.
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Why should those be taught at the level of higher education instead of secondary education?
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Yeah we need that shit in HS. People with a college degree already do pretty well in those areas, it’s the people without any college who are SUPER bad at them.
good job saying something meaningless. everything has opportunity costs.
top 20% aren’t going to public colleges in significant numbers. it’s not going fund bottom 20% by a long shot, public education is always funded by taxes in every developed country.
means-testing is just a wedge the gop uses. don’t get stuck in it.
If you didn’t learn anything useful from your college liberal arts classes, maybe you were just advanced enough going in. But…“got better at understanding other people” is something you learn and it’s not so easy to pinpoint or describe exactly what facts you picked up that got you there.
Your typical 18 year old isn’t going to decide they aren’t going to buy that Camaro just because they took a class in personal finance either.
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Maybe we had different college experiences. All of my core classes were either through a large state university or community college. I sat in auditoriums with a couple hundred other students where I was taught how to read just enough of a book to bullshit a TA. I had CC classes full of people with full time jobs and young kids who were unlikely to complete even that one class, never mind a 2 year degree, and those classes were so easy I had plenty of time to also learn how grim and hopeless life is even for people genuinely trying to get ahead.
At no point did anybody try to teach me or anybody else how to successfully navigate the adult world we were living in. At the university it was kind of assumed that we were supposed to develop those skills ourselves by reading Chaucer or whatever the fuck through the well known liberal arts knowledge assimilation theory of “underpants gnomes”, while ignoring that what everybody was really thinking about was getting drunk and laid. At the community college it was just a sad tale of sad people struggling to complete even the bare minimum requirements.
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Very different college experience. I started and ended at a big public university and took some time off in the middle where I took some community college classes. I majored in English and Math and it was interesting that the lower division English classes were mostly small with lots of interaction with the professors and the upper division classes were large. In Math it worked just the opposite way. I did learn a lot in the English classes. At the most obvious level it was how to write better, but most of what is done is critical thinking and analysis.
My community college classes were full of people who were trying to transfer to four year and, although the material and grades were easier, I learned a lot - especially in a physics class - where there was just an environment full of people trying to do the best they can.
My kids’ experience at community/city college is even better. The classes are designed for transfer to UC and they are absolutely on par with UC classes. There might be something missing in regards to the competition and collaboration from and with peers, but that’s sort of out the window in covid times anyway.
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Pretty insane take imo
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I’d love to see the curriculum on this one. Is there going to be a section on optimizing Tinder profiles?
I had a HS class on relationships, but I went to a Catholic high school.
It was a senior elective. Some people chose to take the class on the apocalypse because its curriculum included watching Empire Strikes Back.
Wait, that’s actually a real thing?
themoreyouknow.jpg
I got a ton out of my core classes even though I was between 32 and 37 when I took most of them. But I also had a lot of gaps from refusing to learn anything in HS and getting tossed out in 11th grade.
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What’s really stupid is having 15 year olds read classic literature. Adolescents don’t have the life experience to appreciate these books, at all.
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They’re learning how to talk good.
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Shakespeare in particular. No high school student gets anything out of shakespeare, get that garbage out of there, have them read something they might actually enjoy.
Interpersonal relationships include a lot more than romantic and sexual ones. For example, “how to not alienate everybody and destroy your own reputation in an online community” might be a good skill to have.
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Sure. I just want to know if the Tinder stuff will be covered.
Yeah, I’m a lol old. Feel free to substitute the appropriate platform.
This was not my experience.