On a person by person basis, I think rhetoric and logic are probably the most important general skills you can develop. Not because they're so useful alone (unless you know of a firm of Stoics hiring), but because they can support and amplify any other skills you have. It doesn't really make society better as a whole, but people who speak well are generally regarded as being smarter, whether or not they actually are. I do think there's a danger in applying too much formal logic to informal situations, but we have a bunch of wiggle room before I'd say that our general intellectual discourse is too sophisticated. If we could even just work out correlation and causality a little better we'd be ahead of the game.
What people think a degree is worth > what a degree is actually worth. Too many sellers, not enough buyers. Eventually, people will realize that blue collar work these days can be a gold mine, and flock to that. I couldn't agree more.
I'm going to second auto shop. I'm also going to say home ec. How many people here know how to sew? Iron? Do basic plumbing? Cook basic foods? A lot of people just don't have those basic skills. I'd take home ec over "health" class any day. Edit: I'm a bit undecided on my future. My parental influence is telling me "Go to college and get a degree in engineering or math," but I'm seriously considering becoming an electrician. Does anyone here have experience with the trades?
This isn't really a subject, but I think that cursive writing is the tool of the devil. Even in the best circumstances, it's barely legible. I was perfectly happy writing in print until I got to the sixth grade, when all of my teachers demanded that all assignments must be in cursive. They spouted off the same line: "When you get to highschool, they won't accept any assignments written in print! No wire hangers!" It was that way all through junior high too. That turned out to be total bullshit. The teachers in highschool didn't care, as long as they could read it. I don't know what those cunts' problem was in middle school.
Focus: I wish I had taken a secondary language class like Spanish. Being bilingual is a skill that not many people have. And of course there's the whole picking up foreign women thing. I'm going to echo what everybody else here said and go with some kind of money management class. Make home economics mandatory and make sure it teaches kids how to live life away from the teat of their parents. I'd also go with a more in depth health and nutrition class. Bring in someone that can A: tell you what's good for you or more importantly, what isn't good for you, and B: show you how to cook it without burning your house down. I like to think that if I had a better idea of what I was putting in my body at that age, I would have taken better care of it. Alt Focus: Fuck mathematics. I never got past algebra 1 in high school. I'm pretty sure if I asked Joe Blow if he could calculate a "Train A leaves the station" question, he'd punch me in the face. For day to day use for most people, I fail to see the point of anything past basic operations, except when you need to calculate a percentage for the tip you're leaving your bartender. Yes, I'm aware of fields that use calculus or whatever, but I'm talking about the rest of us that don't have to use that shit at work.
Dude my print writing and cursive both look like horse shit I got the same thing but for handwriting in general "You're teachers won't accept it for grading if it looks horrible." Low and behold I was still churning out chicken scratch in college that was accepted (by the very few that used long form Blue Book style work). I've argued this before but I think cursive should be the standard not print when it comes to hand writing. It looks much more formal AND since the letters of each word are connected much faster and efficient. Not that I wished I spent more time on legibility but I do kind of feel embarrassed with how horrible it looks when I'm writing on a job form or writing in an address for a letter.
Cursive is funny. They make such a big deal out of it in 1st-4th (ish) grades, and then completely forget about it. Either stick with it, or get rid of it. Rob4Broncos is right, the perceived worth of a degree is huge. I think that more people are starting to realize that blue collar jobs are pretty consistently in demand, and making that shift to the trades. While typing this, I realized that I was and continue to be awful at spelling. It's not like every word is underlined in red, but I find myself pausing to think about it more than I should.
I have to disagree here. When my parents first taught me how to write, it was in the format of technical lettering (the kind of text/font you would find on engineering documents or blueprints). I find the fact that everything I write is immediately legible to overcome any any percieved sense of speed or efficiency. The time saved from cursive is marginal at best, and at worst makes you look as though you have Parkinsons.
I think high schools should invest in more technical programs. The high school I went to had an enormous technical wing, complete with full auto body and mechanic shop, wood shop, machine shop, welding shop, electrical shop, drafting courses, etc. Some do and most don't. Students need to see that there's more to the world than Math, typing and what already happened. Learning about fixing things and how to work hands-on is more than just preparing you for a blue collar career. It's everyday life stuff, and can help you in the future from prevent being ripped off by sleazy contractor. Or, it can prepare you for a well-paying career as a sleazy contractor. Not that it's more important than anything else in school, but I would say it is just as important.
I think a lot more emphasis needs to be placed on making creative leaps with the knowledge you've learned. Kids are forced to read Macbeth with the mentality that it does not apply to them because they're not a dude prone to killing people for no reason. But if you point out that some day they may be dating a huge bitch who might subtly try to manipulate them for their own gains and get them in a load of trouble because she fucking sucks, all of a sudden it makes much more sense, and the story will stick better. Education is so focused on merely presenting information to people who have no idea what to do with it. We need to actually be teaching kids how it is useful and how they can use it later on. That said, there is no reason for high schoolers to be learning calculus unless they're planning on going into engineering or a major that actually uses the damn thing.
I second or third or whatever Economics. The very basics of economics are so easy to understand and so life changing it is a crime to place these lessons in a class that many people never experience. Hell they could teach you about opportunity costs, tradeoffs, and thinking on the margin in a week and a half and right there you've learned so much. Basic financial management and staying within a budget is also critical. The new entry I want to make is a brief class, maybe half a year, on learning about cognitive biases. Learning the ways that our brains mess with us and developing some skills toward counteracting that is hugely valuable. I understand the goal people who suggested logic have in mind, but I think learning about cognitive biases would go much further in accomplishing that goal of more rational thought. They could easily drop a year of English to add in a year where they do all three of the above. A couple of novels that no one reads, and those who do read, don't understand is really quite pointless in the face of such valuable skills.
To elaborate, context is one of the most important things that can be taught, and it's pretty much never emphasized. Macbeth is a great play because it has a lot of insight into the darker side of human nature - lust for power, the willingness to throw morality away to get just a little more of it, the power of guilt and conscience, the stubbornness of our sinful nature, etc. But the way it's taught, no one gets that. They're just reading a difficult-to-read play written by some dude in Elizabethan England about a Scottish guy and his wife. And then the teachers wonder why no one likes reading Shakespeare. I made my point with the post I linked, but I'll say this - if you know a shitload of facts but don't have any greater picture to link those facts together, you know nothing. Unfortunately, schools have a very hard time teaching how to create this greater picture.
If I could go back, I'd plead with my parents to move me out of the Catholic grade school where the motto was, "Fear, Guilt, Penmanship" It was the late 60s-mid 70s when I was in grade school. ADD was diagnosed by the nuns as LAS (lazy and stupid) and was treated and cured by confession and penance. Anyway, if I could change that curriculum, adding a second language as well as music would top my list. My high school classes did what they were supposed to: prepare me for college (and the Jesuits helped me to begin to purge most of the dogmatic nunsense those black-hooded bitches spewed). There never was any thought of me not going to college. It was ingrained in us very early on that a degree was the only way to a better life. Pursuing a Vo-Tech education in or post high school wasn't even presented to me as an option. I'm no Einstein, but I have a pretty good head for business and interpersonal skills. Had I learned a trade, I probably would have had a successful and lucrative business. But, I just followed blindly down the ivy path because, parents know what's best and shouldn't be questioned. And besides, they'd never steer me wrong! We're family! On a separate note, NCLB is fucking up our education system even more. I'm going for a smoke. I've suddenly gotten a familiar, bitter taste in my mouth.
I'd like to have learned the basics of running a small business. There's a useful skill. And not just for the sake of running a small business itself, but for the sake of teaching kids that you can do things besides just go out and find a job working at a company. To that end, perhaps a course that teaches self-confidence, self-reliance, and the ability to problem solve your way out of a brown paper bag, instead of problem solving by saying "let x = 3..." and having to write everything lined up perfectly and just so. I also took auto shop in high school. The course was of limited value because I didn't get to do a whole lot, and some douche of a kid just bullied me the whole time. But anything to teach people that the solutions to common problems can be found within yourself, and not by going to someone else and paying them to fix it, or by throwing that out and getting a new one.
One thing that has suprised me in the last decade or so is the amount of homework that kids in "Primary School" get (from around age 7) through to the end of Primary School at age 10-11. When I was in Primary School, I only vaguely getting homework in grade 6 (final year of Primary School) and possibly grade 5. In the earlier grades we were only expected to do reading at home. From what I have seen, 70% of this homework is done by the kid's parents anyway and the whole thing places stress on both kids and parents, particularly when parents are already time poor. I do agree with Goleman; but where his ideas and theory falls down is in the application. In Australia anyway, unless your parents have the money to send you to a private school (all of which are ALSO Government funded) chances are that your typical Government "State" School does not have the resources or the teaching staff to cater more closely to each student's individual needs and to enable students to maximise their potential.
Which is precisely there should be MORE funding to support such resources and teaching staff, so that a more sensible education system could be implemented. By developing people's abilities in a more focused manner, they will begin to navigate through society in a way that better suits them. They'll have less worry about feeling forced to be a "square peg in a round hole" because they have to resort to being a shitty business major, even though he or she might work better with their hands than anyone else in their state. Not to knock this into some rant about educational reform, but it's ideas like the ones in this thread that ought to be a focal points of the Education Department. The implications of how beneficial that would be are too big to ignore. The problem shouldn't be "how do we best allocate these resources," but rather, "how can we increase the ones we have?" It would address the root cause of many social and economic problems today. Not all, but many.
As much as I agree with you, I can't see it being that much of a priority for governments any more. Voters would rather have tax cuts. It's what I once heard as the "Smart for one, dumb for all mentality"; where individuals or families think that by making money and being more affluent, they can afford themselves and provide for themselves a better education, better health care etc without relying on the government. What happens when more and more people think and behave in this way is that the cost of education, health care etc becomes more and more out of the reach of the average income earner and below. Soon you have the very same people who think they are smarter and can do better for themselves complaining about why everything is so expensive. Yes, I have socialist leanings.
Yes, because throwing money at the situation is directly related to good performance in education, that's why we always kick those 30+ kids per classroom Asain countries' asses in performance metrics, right? Look, how good the teacher is and how well funded the school is is largely irrelevant to the success of a child. That battle was won or lost depending on who they had for parents, their natural inclinations and the other kids in the school district. As for private schools, that's chicken and egg. You're conditioning on the population of kids having parents that care enough about education to drop a boatload of cash on it, of course you are going to get good results. But I'm willing to bet that if you took those kids and the general population and had them switch school districts, the current private school kids would still kick their asses. It has nothing to do with whether they were reading the 7th or 8th edition of a textbook or if they had the most up to date technology and everything to do with proper values being instilled in them and being around other kids ready to learn.
I've seen the end result of these smart Asian kids when they end up in Australian universities as international students first hand. Great at memorising stuff and studying for hours pouring through the books. Not so great at thinking for themselves or "thinking on their feet".
I'm still not buying that ADHD exists. Take a look here, and look at the 'symptoms' and 'diagnostics.' Anything strike you as odd? I'll tell you what strikes me as odd. There's no definitive test, and all the 'symptoms' could easily be explained as 'the kid is fucking bored.' And let's face it, school is hideously boring, I don't blame kids for wanting to climb the walls because all they're learning is how to take a standardized test. Who knows. Maybe they're trying to tell us something. Maybe we ought to listen.