The Topics We Should Be Teaching

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Regardless of your stance on the education system in this country, and despite the herculean efforts of teachers, we can agree by the time kids leave college they aren’t truly prepared for adulthood.

However, we can do something about that.

Just as we now know every dollar invested in Pre-Kindergarten brings about an incredible return, perhaps we can bring about other significant returns by teaching our children about issues we’ve never taught them before. Subjects like:

How to Learn

Much of our time in school is spent being taught, lectured, tested. We spend so much time trying to learn we don’t learn how to learn. Our education is based on this idea of oppressive osmosis. Just keep pounding it into their heads and they will eventually have it sink in.

Students don’t learn how memory works, how learning happens, how one develops understanding and comprehension. And that seems strange to me as it is fundamental to education that children retain what they are taught.

Students don’t learn study habits, focus, or attention. There is no greater battleground these days than the fight for attention. It was hard enough in the time before cell phones but now it is a Sisyphean task. Deep Focus should be required reading for every student.

Children aren’t taught how different people learn in different ways. They are taught learning is a uniform process all must master. They aren’t taught how to train themselves. They are taught who they are is fixed, cement not clay.

Perhaps it is the reason statistics show poor results for America’s academic performance. Among 15-year-olds America ranks 24th in math, 39th in science, and 24th in reading.

Children are taught to repeat, to make flashcards. They ask the perpetual question why. Why do I need to know this? When the more important question is how. How can I come to know this?

Critical Thinking

As children leave high school they also leave behind the opportunity for individualized attention. It becomes so important for young adults to learn to think for themselves. Again, it is something we talk about without truly showing the way.

We teach students to take tests, to regurgitate information and facts, to memorize.

Evaluating statements for validity, dissecting opinions (both others’ and their own), playing devil’s advocate; Those are the components of being able to think for one’s self. Critical thinking is so important for the decisions we all make. Do I need to make this purchase? Is the behavior I’m witnessing acceptable? Critical thought is the moment between understanding and critical action or inaction. We must teach our young to speak up when things don’t seem right and to act when they definitely aren’t.

Every boy and girl should read The Gift of Fear to understand how our senses perceive danger before we can truly comprehend it; how it is important to trust our intuition.

Critical thought helps us consume intentionally instead of blindly. It allows us to evaluate our own actions. It saves us from poor decisions and irrevocable consequences. It is both undervalued and under taught.

Critical thought is what allows young men to stand up for others and to stop or prevent the detrimental actions of other young men. Critical thought is what allows young men and women to speak up when they have been told to keep harmful secrets.

Race Relations

The US has a high wealth concentration but widespread inequality.

Schools teach race. Children are taught about the civil rights movement. But they are taught in a surface manner. All men are created equal. Dr. King. We have come so far. End of story.

Children aren’t taught Black Americans are incarcerated at far higher rates. Children aren’t taught about the inherent bias we all have no matter what our background or how open-minded we are. Children aren’t taught to examine their own upbringing, to dissect the prejudices built into the foundation they never noticed.

There is an otherness to the way children are taught about prejudice.

When I was in school our learning was divided into History and Current events. We were taught history repeats itself. But as recent as any event was, we never truly learned how close at hand that repeat might be. The Holocaust was a thing that happened in the past. The Civil Rights Movement was a thing that happened in the past. Apartheid was something that happened in the past.

I left high school thinking we were all equal. My experiences later in life would prove otherwise.

Personal Financial Education

In High School, we did this project where we picked stocks and learned to follow them over the course of two months. We learned about Price to Earnings Ratio. We learned about Bull Markets and Bear Markets. But we didn’t learn about checking accounts, bank fees, and budgeting. We didn’t learn how credit cards work. We didn’t learn how to use one, manage one, or pay one off.

We didn’t learn a single thing about credit ratings and what contributes to their calculation. We didn’t learn how important that was to every major financial decision we would make during the course of our life.

We didn’t learn how to save for retirement. How to build a financial plan for our life so we wouldn’t end up broke and destitute when Social Security ran out.

We learned about macroeconomics, microeconomics, and the global economy in a broad sense. Our schooling, incomprehensibly, put the workings of the greater economy at a much higher value than making sure we knew how to operate on a day to day basis.

So it’s no wonder the U.S. Ranks 14th in financial literacy.

Kids leaving high school think they will all be millionaires. But they never learn how much money you make is no guarantee of how much money you keep. They don’t learn how taxes work, how health care expenses work, how the older you get and the more your life expands the more your expenses follow suit.

It makes sense the average American has $4,000 in credit card debt.

Human Sexuality and Gender

Children are taught about human sexuality from a mechanical perspective. Biology. Reproduction. Maturation. But that is such a sliver of what they need to know. We don’t teach young people that they account for half of all new STD infections.

We don’t teach our children how gender impacts the way we see and treat each other. Not our biology but the way we create and apply gender. And at no time has that been more important than the ever-expanding gender fluidity of the present.

Children don’t learn how gender influences the way they speak in everyday interactions. They are not taught to critique their own language, how to create and think critically about themselves.

Children aren’t taught 1 in 6 women will be sexually assaulted in their life.

We send our young men off to college hoping they have the common sense to understand consent. We fail to understand common sense always has been and always will be uncommon.

What goes unsaid goes untaught.

We send our young women off to college without the confidence to report sexual abuse. In 2014 the justice department said 20% of campus sexual assault goes unreported.

Is it any wonder that boys who violate women without consequence grow into men who do the same?

It is fair to say nobody was prepared for the influx of pornography the internet brought. And we certainly weren’t prepared for pornography to become the defacto sex ed class for generations of young boys and girls.

We didn’t learn about how addicting porn would become. How it would fundamentally change the way men and women engage with each other. It impacts physical behavior. Grooming habits. Acceptability. Interactions.

We didn’t learn how porn models aggressive behavior for men and sets a standard of recessive behavior for women.

Schooling is highly dependent on decisions made at levels far above the teachers’ pay grade. Teachers are only able to teach what their school district will allow. And based on national and local politics, that will always vary wildly between states. I don’t expect these subjects will make it into the curriculum anytime soon.

But at what cost?

The litany of statistics above is not meant to forge a pessimism about the future, quite the opposite. The facts show just how much gency we truly have to shape our reality.

It’s not just educators in the traditional sense who have the responsibility. Whether its parents, mentors, or friends we all have a responsibility to educate the generations that come after us.

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