When I look back at my schooldays, it's laughable how many essential adult skills they never taught me and how naive and ignorant I was until I enlarged my education by other means.
I may have absorbed plenty of French, Latin, Mathematics and Chemistry, but my awareness of anything other than academic was abysmal.
One glaring omission was any knowledge of women. I went to two single-sex schools and saw little of the other sex before I started work. It took me a while to adjust to these strange beings with their very different view of life.
I never learnt any practical skills apart from woodwork (Why woodwork? You may well ask). I'm still an ignorant bungler when it comes to cookery, clothing repairs and alterations, painting, electrics, plumbing, or car mechanics. I wasn't taught anything about money matters like banking, mortgages, insurance, wills or tax returns. All those things I had to find out for myself over the years.
And what of all those social skills I only picked up after leaving school - dating, sexual relationships, holding down a job, dealing with difficult people, being true to myself, being discreet, and how to behave at things like leaving dos, marriages, births and funerals. About the only social skills I acquired at school were dodging bullies and routinely exposing my naked body.
Probably the most useful skill the university of life has taught me is critical thinking. When I was young I was remarkably gullible and would happily soak up other people's ideas. Gradually I learnt to look at those ideas more carefully and see if they actually made sense or not. An awful lot of them didn't.
A skill that's been much more useful than chemistry.
I have always maintained that the only thing that my Business School education gave me was a good campus recruitment job. It was real life situations that taught me to survive in a dog eat man world and the most important of those skills was man management. I learnt early on that upward, sideward, and downward, the way to succeed is to manage relationships and I still hold them to be true for real life situations.
ReplyDeleteRamana: I found the same. Knowing how to manage relationships was crucial to keeping a job and getting other people's support and cooperation.
DeleteOne of the most important lies inculcated at school was that if you worked hard you would succeed....well, up to a point Lord Copper.
ReplyDeleteMy observations led me to the view that you would succeed if you had money and parents' network behind you and you blew your own trumpet incessantly.
Fly: Yes, and the government is still trying to con us that hard work is the key to success. Buttering up the right people is much more likely to get results.
DeleteI suppose the definition of success can't be measured in material things but in how we navigate our way through relationships and other challenges. I remember my grandparents living with such joy in absolutely impoverished circumstances but my grandfather would head off to work on a high-nelly bike with a spade over his shoulder and whistling happily and then play the fiddle at night with his buddies in the front yard of his cottage.
ReplyDeleteI learned so much about joy from my grandparents and not so much from my father who was angry most of the time even though we were all pushed academically and culturally to leave my grandparents' lives behind as a sort of failure.
Critical thinking. What a blessing.
XO
WWW
www: Similar story here. I loved my maternal grandma, who was always cheerful and philosophical, while my father was constantly angry and bad-tempered. But I'm glad to say my grandparents' lives were never seen as a failure.
DeleteI was lucky that my public school education included courses in bookkeeping, budgets, cooking, sewing, and even metal shop. Both sexes were required to take those courses. Unfortunately, by the time my kids were in school, the STEM program had taken over and practical skills went by the wayside.
ReplyDeleteBijoux: Wow, there are some good practical subjects there. A shame they've now been abandoned in favour of strictly academic options.
Deletethis is a great post Nick. I wonder if a truly well rounded education will ever come back to the mainstream. it's as needed today as it always was.
ReplyDelete"just knowing how to get in out of the rain!" :)
it seems even simple 'COPING with life' comes hard for the masses here. there's a danger in huge groups who've never really had to do 'without!' a danger to themselves and to others. not a good combination with our gun culture here I think.
Tammy: Indeed, coping with life is a struggle for a lot of people, and a bit more knowledge of basic everyday skills would make a big difference.
DeleteI took responsibility for my education while I was in high school and appreciated the teachers that helped. I found my training in science to be invaluable.
ReplyDeleteJean: As someone with a scientific frame of mind, I'm sure you greatly appreciated science lessons. I studied chemistry, biology and physics at school and was hopeless at all of them!
DeleteMy Dave's mother taught all her kids how to cook, sew, do laundry, etc. I have benefited many times from that. Let's not leave it all up to the schools.
ReplyDeleteLinda: That's brilliant. If only my mum had taught me all those things. Or my father for that matter.
DeleteI've been thinking of this some more. Doing well in physics at a good university meant I never had a problem finding interesting jobs, which was one of the main reasons I chose that major. But it also forced me to do creative problem solving, which was rough at the time but got me fascinated by how the mind makes creative leaps. A fun hobby if there ever was one: https://cheerfulmonk.com/2008/08/18/my-brain-is-my-favorite-toy/
ReplyDeleteJean: Creative problem solving is another skill we should all have developed. And creativity in general is something schools should encourage.
DeleteI've always believed getting an education only shows you are capable of learning.
ReplyDeleteJoanne: We should all have the ability to keep learning and opening our minds to new possibilities. Too many people have fixed ideas they refuse to abandon whatever the contrary evidence.
DeleteI think it mostly shows you are good at taking tests. I tended to forget nearly everything once the test was over because what I was supposedly learning was of little interest to me.
DeleteLinda: Absolutely. Most of what I memorised to get me through exams vanished without trace as soon as I left school!
DeleteWe are strange (and wonderful beings) aren't we!! Very interesting post Nick. I just had a standard education and left school at 15. I was painfully naive, but in those days the only aspirations my parents equipped me for were marriage and babies.
ReplyDeletePolly: I think that's probably what my parents expected of my sister. But your leaving school at 15 doesn't seem to have done you any harm....
DeleteI think everyone feels that way now a days. There are things that are not taught in school that should be.
ReplyDeleteMary: A large number of things that weren't taught. Mind you, if they taught everything on my list, we'd have been at school 24 hours a day!!
DeleteYes, our real education begins after we leave Univ. — a never-ending process as there is so much to learn. Circumstances were such my opportunity for socialization through high school was somewhat limited when we lived in basically rural areas. So there was more to learn once I went to Univ. then afterward. Adapting and adjusting wasn’t always as easy as it might have been but our life process is what it is. I’ve enjoyed having close friends but so few still living or living close by. Opportunities for developing new relationships diminished in my later years due to responsibilities and that has been a disappointment but I’m reconciled.
ReplyDeleteJoared: That's one thing you learn as an adult - that a great deal of adapting and adjusting is needed to deal with the complexities of life.
DeleteCritical thought ought to be the primary thing taught in school. I really do believe the mess we're in in my country is largely due to an ignorant minority who can't think their way out of a paper bag (lead by a president who has a scrambled brain).
ReplyDeleteI know I didn't graduate from school knowing how to do much of anything - cooking, money management, and so on. But somehow I picked it up over the years.
Agent: I agree. It's shocking how many people pick up the most absurd ideas and are incapable of seeing how absurd they are. Like building a wall around Mexico.
DeleteLike injecting disinfectant.
DeleteSx
Ms Scarlet: Exactly. Or like coronavirus being transmitted through 5G masts. Or like the idea that you can surgically change sex.
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