I was going to post this in the more serious Debating Forum since I feel genuinely angry about it. However, I have decided just to laugh instead and have given up on trying to convince people that schools can and should only do a certain amount.

I have made the point somewhere else but since then have noted an increase in the number of subject areas people (the public generally and / or agencies) would like included in school curricula and, by the way, I have forgotten several such areas. Over the past several months they have included

Parenting Skills
Babysitting Skills
Money Managment (including banking and mortgages information)
Internet Dangers
Alcohol Education
Drugs Education
Sex Education
Road Traffic Education
Car Maintenance Classes
Driving Instruction
Anti-vandalism education (including not setting fire to gorse bushes during hot weather)
Reasons not to attack fire service vehicles and / or personnel
Reasons not to attack police services
Reasons not to attack health staff
Reasons not to attack the elderly
Self-defence classes
Suicide Prevention strategies
Life-saving classes
First aid classes
Prevention of Cruelty to animals
Litter Prevention
Stranger Danger (awareness of being abducted etc)




Now, I could go to list several others. On the serious side - I do know that schools provide for some / most of these. I also know that some are touched on in subject areas / cross curricular areas etc - although often this is information-giving - not training or education. However, I wonder what parents have responsibility for -maybe they should do the Maths, English, Languages, Science, History, Geography etc, etc, etc since there seems little time on the school curriculum for these subjects if all of the above (and more) were to be dealt with by schools?

Any suggestions as to what else schools should include so as parents don't have to do anything at all???

One ought to add in the spirit of the above:

Not to dial 999 except in a real emergency. (Schools also to teach the difference between real and unreal emergencies).
The supreme importance of respect. (Since some people may not always deserve respect there would of course also be classes on whom to respect and why).
How to cast a vote in an election.
How to be British.

How to count back change when you're a cashier?

re maths subjects- long long long ago in a galaxy far far away I remember doing maths 'O' levels. We did a heck of a lot of algebra which I found quite fun at the time but which was pretty useless to 99% of us after the age of 16. I never found an Algebrain with whom I could converse in Algebra, so...

Basic statistical understanding is MUCH more useful. There are all sorts of stats thrown out in the newspapers and the media in general. Our kids need to be able to look at these critically and be aware of all the misrepresentation possible. A graph can be a picture painting a thousand words or it can be a lie.

How to clean up after themselves ...

What about manners 101

Great suggestions so far! We might as well go ahead and clutter up the school curriculum even further!

Given that it is proposed that schools should provide after-school clubs and homework clubs (a contradiction in concept and terminology) for kids, should we officially abolosh parental responsibility completely and prosecute schools / execute teachers for anti-social behaviour committed by any pupils.

By the way, since I posted this yesterday I heard someone on television talking about teaching children about bullying and car theft and joy riding. Another person was talking about shorter summer holidays. So the list would now read

Bullying
Car Theft
Joy riding
Parenting Skills
Babysitting Skills
Money Managment (including banking and mortgages information)
Internet Dangers
Alcohol Education
Drugs Education
Sex Education
Road Traffic Education
Car Maintenance Classes
Driving Instruction
Anti-vandalism education (including not setting fire to gorse bushes during hot weather)
Reasons not to attack fire service vehicles and / or personnel
Reasons not to attack police services
Reasons not to attack health staff
Reasons not to attack the elderly
Self-defence classes
Suicide Prevention strategies
Life-saving classes
First aid classes
Prevention of Cruelty to animals
Litter Prevention
Stranger Danger (awareness of being abducted etc)
Homework Clubs
After-school clubs

With the creation of shorter summer holidays to further allow parents to abdicate responsibility. Maybe we should go for the old Spartan system of taking children at birth and raising them.

Today there is a news item on the BBC website to the effect that a report that has just appeared wants schools to teach kids how to cope with life and be happy. Here's the link:


http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/6618431.stm

From what I see around here, the parents need to learn this stuff too.

Great article, Bloomsby! I rest my case!

See one of the comments there in the article Bloomsby linked to?

"We should be teaching children about the real world. I am a mortgage broker and have an 18 year old son. He has no idea about obtaining finance and what the implications are if you default on your loan or credit card. Kids need to be taught or guided in living a practical life and how people are all different and how we must come to understand, know and tolerate people in society. "

The parent is a mortage broker and his 18 year old son has no idea about finance? What the ... ? Teaching your own child about half of this kind of stuff must be in teh job description of being a parent, doesn't it?

Exactly, Copago! When I read that, I wondered how much time the man had spent with his son and whether he cared about his son.

I sometimes note with interest that the subject that earns me the highest scores in the Global Challenge is the one directly related to my late father's occupation. At school the subject wasn't taken seriously ...

My goodness, those are almost all subjects that parents should be teaching their children on a daily basis as the kids grow, as the situations occur.

Instead, families have "quality time" (Disneyland).

Kids need "quantity time" - be there all the time, teaching everything.

>>Maybe we should go for the old Spartan
>> system of taking children at birth and
>> raising them.

Sort of like Hitler Youth?

Quote:

---

The parent is a mortage broker and his 18 year old son has no idea about finance? What the ... ? Teaching your own child about half of this kind of stuff must be in teh job description of being a parent, doesn't it?

---

You took the words right out of my mouth. I find it really annoying when parent abdicate their responsibilities to teach their children and expect teachers to do it all. And I really wish the school system would get on with the job of teaching kids useful skills (like the 3 R's - "reading, 'riting and 'rithmatic"). I've already complained in another forum about how my daughter is in her last year of high school and has only read ONE book for her English class - they analyse CD covers and films instead of actually reading. Enough said!

I can't believe someone came up with the concept of happiness classes! Perhaps happiness might follow if kids were taught useful skills to cope with and control their lives, and if their parents gave them a moral and spiritual education.

It is sad to see how little some parents actually teach their children and how much teachers are expected to teach them. I teach Spanish, but it's hard to teach Spanish for all of the other things that I have to take time out for and teach the students first! We are expected to teach everything that they should be getting at home, but when we try and teach these kids how to act, the parents come up to the school and give the principal an earfull about how we are picking on their child!

Even if we take all the time in the world to teach the things on the list above, we wouldn't get everything covered and half of it would be lost once the students returned home to an environment where those things are not being reinforced.

Maybe we should just teach them 'what to teach your kids once you become a parent'

Still enjoying the contributions. Tiffanyram is very close to the answer when she talks about 'Maybe we should just teach them 'what to teach your kids once you become a parent'.

We should think about devoting the whole school curriculum to this and call it something like 'Idiot-Proof Parenting. Better still, let's send the children home and get the parents in!

One demanding section of the population that did not occur to me is that of Business and Industry. For a year I sat on a committee to discern the perceived needs of industry and business when it came to the employment of students. We heard much about the need for transferable skills, initiative, co-operation, teamwork, communication and ICT skills. This gave rise to a curriculum that brought so-called Key Skills to the fore. Imagine the frustration of people like myself when employers virtually ignored the types of qualifications / courses to which their advice had given impetus and they continued to advertise for qualifications in the older, traditional subjects. Nothing wrong with the latter by the way but it would have saved a lot of time and expense to say nothing of the efforts of the students if the employers had stated this in the first place.

Anyway, what's wrong with employers supplying training in the key skills we are told they value so highly?

You should see what goes on in the US schools under the guise of education. I think there's a big emphasis on homework and because homework competes for attention span with other things now, it's become a major war between kids who manage this task and those who don't. I'm not saying homework is a bad thing per se, but that undue emphasis on it for the sake of giving homework, rather than emphasizing something you've learned is not effective.

You've got lots of kids flunking out of school who are intelligent enough, but who find the homework system exceedingly boring because it's just there for the sake of busy work, not truly reinforcing an idea.
I'm a tutor and I recently helped a kid with a science lesson and it took us two hours to get through it. The way it was worded was so heavy and incomprehensible that it's a wonder a child makes it through on their own.
It was a useful lesson on humidity and barometers, but worded in a way that made me glaze over, much less the teenaged victim of the lesson. I think that anything they'd been given to do at home would be at least accessible to a mere mortal, much less a teen. If the child spends two hours battling that one, they'll lose their power on the four other subjects that night and fail the others and probably won't succeed at the one they worked on. Seems to me that the heavy duty things should be done in class if at all possible, and lighter fare for the night.

Imagine, many American kids who are really good at math fail math. I hear this time and time again, and yet, we're sorely in need of people with these skills in the workforce. Why are these kids failing math? Because the way the classes are structured, someone who can arrive at the answers quickly is probably penalized instead of rewarded! We have about five people in our family who are this way. My son is one of them. Thank goodness his cousin also had this 'problem' and went on to major in math at one of the top universities in the States. That gives us hope. Seems to me that there is something inherently wrong with the US system that's basically rewarding people for trying (although that's the only way I'd probably pass a math class) but those who arrive at a solution to a problem with a different method are penalized because they haven't done it the teacher's way lose points and fail math. Their performance on standardized tests shows they're clearly talented in math!

English. We're currently 'obeying' the dictates of Bush's No Child Left Behind Act in the States, that has merit theoretically, but, in practice, becomes test driven and actually puts lots of money on people passing tests in certain subject areas that are dictated, but in a way that leaves no room for vocational courses and the teachers of those courses are retiring and no one is around to replace them. Even the English that would benefit them so much, is not being taught in classes, but they're learning a type of English that isn't helping them at all. Once again, intelligent young people are failing English in droves because it is so focused on minute things and fails to address their needs for the work world. I've seen homework on incredibly detailed things like similes and metaphors but totally lacking in depth. It's fine to know what those are, but if you can't write a complete paragraph still, then does it serve a whole lot of purpose?
It feels like party tricks instead of true writing to me.
I don't think a kid is an idiot because they cannot identify a simile, but, I would worry more if I see they cannot write a letter to apply for a job.

Parenting. Well, you know there was actually a sociology course at my high school in the seventies that did a unit on parenting. I'm sure there were parents complaining about it as it included birth control! However, they lugged around a ten pound flour sack for a whole week between the 'couples' formed. It was hilarious in one way if you had a class with them, but they couldn't let the flour sack get out of their sight. THey had to make a budget for things etc. I often wondered if the kids who did this thought twice about having children too early!

I think I'm finding that some things are incredibly hard to teach your child formally, but it's easier to teach by example. We read a lot, and our children don't read much, but they both write as we both write, um, rather a lot.
I draw and most of the people on my side draw. Both children draw easily and it's a given. I refused to teach the children piano after they'd grown enough to reach the keys, but played with them earlier than that. THe reason was that as an autodidact myself, I'd learned totally wrong fingerings. I read music easily as I grew up watching people read music like it was just another language, and in fact, writing it...but, my keyboarding wasn't really good. They had lessons and they play with better fingering than I do.

Swimming is one of those skills that's imposed on you in the French school system. I wasn't keen on them going with a bunch of yahoos jumping on their heads and dunking them in, but, the system works well. They learned a few things, then, their father taught them to swim in the sea, and they're now completely confident swimmers in the sea or a pool. I feared that as I hate boorish behavior as I was almost drowned as a kid on two occasions. So I wasn't teaching them!

Driving, used to be taught in school when I was younger in California. Now, you have to win the lottery to get it in school so end up paying for it.
Driving is one of the hardest things to teach your own child that I know. Probably good to have another teacher.

French curriculum tends to lack in practical skills or makes them so difficult that it's a wonder that you're supposedly learning how to send an e mail because most of the ten year olds could have taught it quicker than that!
If you're 'tracked' over to a more vocational track, you may learn more practical things, but, they're taught in a very formal way.

One of the good things about the US system is that, if you manage to swim to the surface of the basic courses despite the way they're being taught, you can take courses on how to make films, or create things and you can find a job and have those skills validated. So many high schoolers are working already and it's great. They're normally under the supervision of a teacher so they can share notes about the work world. I was able to earn money by being in a working band and creating artwork that way because my teachers would pass along jobs. It was great.

I guess my point about the basic courses are that they're being taught according to dictates that have little to do with the actual needs of the students. I wish teachers had more leeway on the way they taught.

Oh, I agree with the homework thing. Homework is supposed to reinforce what you learned in the classroom. But for those people who already understand the concept, it's simply busywork. What good is another 50 math problems due the next day when you understood the 20 examples in class? Another student, however, might need another 100 more before understanding... But for that kid, the 50 is going to be torture as it will take hours for the student to get through. I can't tell you how many homework assignments I completed in lunch after they were given because they were simply boring to me and I didn't feel like dealing with them when I got home.

For math, you aren't rewarded with coming up with alternate ways to solve the problem. I remember being taught 'short division' and we had to use that on a test... When do you ever use that when long division works and works betetr as there's less chance for error? Also, for algebra, logic and geometry, I was always figuring alternate formulas that worked that the teacher had to test in order to correct my work as I never ended up taking the most obvious route.

In English, in middle school and a year or so in high school, we used a line of 'vocabulary books' that followed the same pattern from unit to unit. But there was always one exercise each week that was designed poorly that you struggled to get through it. But there were 5 other exercises, so why keep inflicting the poor one on us?

We never had to do the flour sack/egg thing for parenting, thank God. I think my rebellious self would have said no to that one and argued for why it wasn't realistic and a myriad of reasons why I should have to write an essay instead.

We did have to do an AIDS example with clear water - some of which had a chemical in it. You had to mix your water with a certain number of other people's and after everyone was done, a reagent was added and everyone whose water now contained the chemical would change a certain colour. I argued that it wasn't a true representation as some would not have been intimate with anyone else, etc. (I hated health class, can you tell? Somehow my calorie counter thing said I was taking in fewer calories than using... I made my project be a short story of someone quitting smoking - luckily I got an A as I really disliked the teacher and was totally unmotivated by any of the topics.)

One thing that is common to points raised by Bruyere and Ladymacb29 (and very accurately) is the tendency for politicians to come up with 'national' and / or 'state' priorities for education. These are usually short-term measures / solutions that are ill thought out and merely eye-catching, populist quick-fix headlines. The advantage for most politicians is that they are out of the job before the consequences of their actions kick in. It is then schools and teachers who suffer the resultant flack!

I wish that somehere in the world they would implement a sound curriculum based on sound methodology and allow teachers the sort of leeway for lesson planning and presentation advocated by Bruyere. Whatever its priorities and methodologies a consistently applied, carefully monitored, sensitively and sensibly amended long-term process might yield some very interesting results. Instead, some politician (often advised by teachers or ex-teachers who are no longer teaching and have lost touch with the realities of school) will issue decrees from some ivory tower and cut and run before the consequences are felt.

All of the points made by Bruyere and Ladymacb29 are valid and well worth more detailed discussion. The teaching of Math(s), Modern Languages and the whole field of homework - these are all fascinating and worthwhile areas for debate. So too is the whole preoccupation with assessment instead of curriculum. Is assessment the servant of the curriculum or the sole / main purpose of it.

But hey, folks, this is becoming heavy enough for the Debating Forum - my initial point was simpy to raise a facetious and mischievious question about schools having to perform all of society's role. Having read about the amount / type of homework being sent home with kids in the US, maybe the schools and the teachers are engaged in a subtle retaliatory strike and reversing roles - in other words saying 'Here - you do some of the work with your kids as well!'

I'm not sure what the proportion of parents doing their kids' homework is in the States, but, I'd suspect it's a third and I'm probably naive. (as a teacher, I try never to give out dud homework!)
In France, I'd suspect about half of the homework is done by the parents. Lots of French consider it their sworn duty to help their kids and, 'help' is taken a bit too seriously in some instances. My children would fight you off like grim death in that battle, so, I guess they managed on their own. I was only called in when war was declared, such as an art history assignment that no student of mine in university would ever have managed!
I didn't do it for the kid, but just skimmed the reading and spat it out.


I think when I saw how far behind the French schools were in technology, it shocked me. THey have some great minds there...lots of potential and creativity. I went to the local school to meet the new teacher in the village and said that we had some great software for children to write stories and use images. The teacher said that she couldn't possibly accept it because, the instructions were all in English, and, she didn't know how to install it.
I said, 'well you know my daughter knows how to do that, and read the manual if you wish. She could translate it for you.' But no, she wouldn't accept. I had always taught my children to perform basic operations on the computers from day one. The French teacher could not accept this. Oh well.

Gee, guess I did teach them something!

I guess what I saw in preschools was probably the saddest situation in many ways. I worked in a few, but one was a long hot summer on the US East Coast, in a hard working neighborhood. Whenever we needed the parents' help for their three year old's terrifyingly bad behavior, we tried to be supportive, but nine times out of ten, we'd get blamed for not 'supervising' the kids! Because they were working themselves silly, they had no energy left for the children. THe kids would come to school after watching horror movies on their own and tell us things. It was hard to do that job. The parents expected us to make the kids behave. Some of them would insist that their child not take a nap so they'd sleep later!
Agony may even back me up on this one, but, I learned a lot about kids that year.