Things You Should Have Been Taught in School...
We all make the lists, but do we really want schools teaching more stuff when they can't even teach kids to read properly?
“Why weren’t we taught about [fill in the blank] in school?”
It’s a question almost everyone has asked at some point, and the internet is replete with lists of many such topics:
Why weren’t you taught these things? The dirty not-so-secret secret is that our education system isn’t designed to educate. It’s designed to breed compliance and babysit our kids while adults grow the economy.
There’s an easy mantra: the purpose of a system is what it does. If our system was designed to actually educate children, we’d probably see better than 30% proficiency rates. But we don’t:
But let’s move on to those actual subjects that aren’t “taught”.
Of all the articles that I went through, this one is from Freedom Sprout is the best and most thorough (it’s a 48 minute read). It includes 47 total points in four broad categories:
Personal Finance
Mindset & Thinking
Business & Productivity
Self-Care & Life Skills
And these categories make sense. I’d encourage you to skim through the linked post: it gives a good sense of what these subjects could cover and why it’s important.
Before we get any further though, I’ve got to add Probability & Statistics to the list. Probability is critical to understanding and evaluating so many real-life decisions and, if nothing else, should prevent you from losing your shirt gambling or buying lottery tickets. Statistics is essential for understanding the modern world and what is actually going on, how to spot outliers, and how to evaluate news and other information.
Of course, a lot of bits and pieces of these can be sprinkled in throughout a child’s life. But there is value to structured education around any topic, and these are no exception! Structured lessons help children (or anyone for that matter) crystallize the intuitive and ad hoc learnings and coalesce them into higher level understanding.
Schools Won’t Teach Them, So What’s Next?
Thankfully, the internet provides ample opportunities to learn about almost any topic… if you spend the time to look!
You can find a bunch of great materials and even full curriculum on many of these topics. Just search “[topic] homeschool curriculum” and you’ll find many options.
But, if we’re being honest, most parents don’t have the time for teaching a full course on these topics, and many kids may not be up for engaging on that much work after a full day of school.
This conundrum is a large part of why I built Intellect Inbox, a free educational service to send you personalized, bite-sized, lessons on any topic!
Intellect Inbox uses the latest AI (GPT-4 currently) to generate lessons on any subject that are personalized to who is learning. For parents, it will provide you with:
some background on the topic and why it is important,
descriptions of the core concepts involved,
suggest ways to introduce it to your child, and then
provide an activity that is easy for you to setup but can give your child hours of hands-on experience to really learn about the topic!
We have over 120 subjects that you can choose from to get e-mails 1, 2, 3, 5, or even all 7 days of the week. Of course, that includes Finance, Critical Thinking, Business, and Life Skills, Probability & Statistics, and much much more!
This also derived from working with our nieces and nephews. We used ChatGPT to come up with science experiments for them, which they greatly enjoyed. However, it was also tough to get ChatGPT to keep generating new ideas rather than rehashing the most common experiences. We’ve solved that with Intellect Inbox, and it’s already been providing months of engaging content for kids and adults alike!