I heard someone make an offhand comment on a podcast this way say that he neither he, nor anyone he knows, had ever used the quadratic equation to solve polynomials even though that was the focus of an entire year of high school trigonometry that every college bound student was required to take. This stuck in head. I’ve been thinking about my own education.
After 5th grade, with few exceptions, the rest of my time in school was spent learning things I never used again. In fact, I never used probably 90% of what I was taught. The exceptions for me fell into two groups:
- Classes that helped me get into college, receive a small academic scholarship and skip a few entry level courses.
- A handful of classes that introduced me to physics, biology and chemistry so that made advance courses I took in college slightly easier.
What I’ve been thinking about is “Why?”
I have already thought a lot about the “What?” part of my education that was missing.
I have very strong opinions on what I now think would have been much more helpful to me:
- Financial literacy, budgeting, financial planning, investing.
- Paying for college. Debt, interest, credit cards, student loans and their real-world implications.
- Basic home maintenance and repair.
- Typing and more computer work.
- Actual fitness and diet coaching vs. the mandatory bullshit daily gym/health/public shower we were forced to take in order to graduate.
- Business Communications – creating/delivering presentations, resume writhing, job interview coaching, business writing.
- Problem solving and research – Not learning how to properly cite a reference but actually learning how to find and evaluate reference materials that would help me solve problems.
- Careers. What it is really like to be on the job market with and without a college education. Much more job shadowing and on-the-job internships and trainings in high school.
In other words, how to be an adult.
As for getting back to “Why?” I suspect there are multiple reasons including:
- Tradition
- Institutional and systemic inertia
- Resistance to change from all authority figures ranging from parents, to teachers, to local governments, to school boards and everyone else involved.
I think most of these people never thought deeply about the why beyond to graduate from high school and get a good job or “you’ll need this for college”.
Apprenticeships, tech schools and career specific training seem to be more suited to what I wanted from college. Eventually, I obtained all of this through experience, on-the-job training, a lifetime of mistakes and self-study.
I know that school is much different than it was when I was a student 4 decades ago. I hope for the kids’ sake that at least some people are asking “Why?” and offering something better than what I had and having better answers than “it’s the way we’ve always done it.”
