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Parents want teachers to do more when it comes to teaching their children about social and life skills inside the classroom, according to a new report.
The joint study between Monash University researchers and the Australian Scholarship Group (ASG) is the only one of its kind to investigate the state of education in Australia from parents' perspective.
Undertaken by Monash Faculty of Education associate professors Sivanes and Shane N. Phillipson, the report said Australian parents want their children to have access to a "holistic education".
According to the study, 69 per cent of parents believe schools should do more to teach their child about social skills. When ethnicity is factored in, the proportion increases substantially to 94 per cent among Indian and other Asian parents.
Furthermore, 49 per cent of parents agree they would like their child's school to do more about teaching them how to behave in public, which increases to 74 per cent among Indian and other Asian parents.
The mantra "The Corps is mother, the Corps is father" springs to mind.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 13 2017, @11:45PM (37 children)
Look at the fights over sex ed. Look at how shop class died.
Here are some of the life skills I want:
Learn how to shoot a pistol and shotgun for self-defense. Learn how to short a stock, buy options, etc. (heck I still need this) Learn how to change a flat tire. Learn how to replace a light fixture, light switch, and outlet box. Learn how to repair a large hole in drywall. Learn how to replace a door lock. Learn how to mend a torn sofa. Learn how to have an affordable wedding. Learn how to minimize trouble when stopped by the police. Learn how to dress for an interview, being aware of industry expectations. Learn how to make eye contact and shake hands in a professional setting, and how to greet/introduce people. Learn how to get a date. Learn how to properly trim or remove a tree with a gas chainsaw. Learn how to make data backups that are resistant to being lost, using cross-platform concepts. Learn how to deal with PGP mail, not tied to a specific client. Learn how to avoid cross-contamination involving poo, raw meat, cash, doorknobs, and other sources of trouble. Learn how to use a steamer, pressure cooker, and wok. Learn how to prep a house for a hurricane. Learn how to prevent mold and termites. Learn how to care for and teach an uncircumcised kid. Learn how to avoid, detect, and cure cases of: pinworms, lice, warts, pinkeye. Learn how to catch, clean, cook, and eat fish. Learn how to put out a fire. Learn how to grow several kinds of vegetables. Learn how to avoid many kinds of fraud, theft, and assault. Learn to touchtype and to write well in cursive. Learn to turn off a sink without getting contaminated hands. Learn to canoe. Learn to swim efficiently and to swim with eyes up/forward. Learn to breastfeed and to do a breast exam. Learn to do a natural childbirth without injury. Learn how to incorporate a small business, properly hire an employee, keep the books, and deal with the paperwork. Learn how to replace a kitchen sink. Learn how to replace a toilet. Learn how to chart fertility based on mucus properties. Learn how to drive in icy conditions, with a trailer, backwards around turns, up and down hills. Learn how to safely kill and dispose of disease-carrying vermin. Learn about building permits. Learn about keeping central air conditioning functional and spore-free.
Oh, we don't agree? Somebody is having fits over liability? Darn. Well, back to teaching kids to hate America.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 14 2017, @12:12AM (3 children)
So you want everyone to join the Boy Scouts? The breastfeeding and rhythm birth control methods aren't currently taught, but I wouldn't be surprised if they create merit badges which cover those activities since they're going to allow females to join in mass. Well, circumcision isn't talked about either but cursive needs to die. There's enough languages in the world without them having multiple methods of writing. Everything else you listed you can do in Cub/Boy Scouts.
If you had better financial training you'd know you shouldn't be playing the stock market. There are many other better ways to passively make money. Trying to actively make money off the stock market is idiotic. You can get much better returns actively doing tons of other things.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 14 2017, @12:46AM (1 child)
If you had better financial training you'd know you shouldn't be playing the stock market
I am at about 700k on the stockmarket for 200k in ~10 years. I did that with passive investments in decent stocks. Something I had to teach myself how to do. It was not terribly hard but took a decent amount of negative learning to get right.
There are tons of skills that could be taught in school. But they are not.
Things like 'how to do your taxes'. Pretty much everyone has to do that. Yet pretty much only accountants are 'allowed'. You can go your own but the instructions suck ass.
How your gov works and how you can get involved. You know what we used to call civics class.
How to balance your budget. Everyone also has to do this but most people suck at it.
Fixing and repairing things is a good skill to have. It saves you tons of money as well as being 'tree huger'. You may even say it is conservative.
Everything else you listed you can do in Cub/Boy Scouts.
Which is a club where not everyone is invited in. It also costs a decent amount of cash and time to get into. Something a good portion of the population does not have.
Their and my point? Simple things taught in a class can go a long way to helping out huge swaths of our population with small to low cost effort. Instead its 'fuck you, I got mine. sucks your parents dont know either because they were not taught either'.
since they're going to allow females to join in mass.
Only a few will do that. Those will be the ones trying to show to the world how progressive they are. The rest will be putting their girls into girls scouts to get a mainline of thin mints. Who have the same set of skills that are taught.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 14 2017, @06:49AM
If you've got a safe nest egg then great, but isn't real estate much faster? That 200k can be used for four down payments of 50k and you can end up with 4k a month after all expenses if you invested nationally (your local real estate market costs may be much higher than other areas). Once you find those four properties you can retire a simple life on 4k a month. Though chances are you'll keep going. In a few years your tenants will have paid enough principle that you can refinance and buy more houses without costing you another penny of your money. That effect snowballs and you can ride it until you hit your risk limits. Then you sit and wait 1-2 decades and as your mortgages start being paid off, your semi-passive income triples. Now you're over 10k a month, usable for whatever you want rather than keeping it locked up until retirement.
I agree with you that people should be taught way more life skills than they are and I'm glad there's more than one way to get good money. But Boy Scouts can teach you a very wide range of skills. I'd tell you to just go buy the merit badge books if you can't join, but all the info is available on the internet. You can teach yourself anything nowadays. But knowing that you can/should and finding the drive to do so is difficult. There's far too much learned helplessness in the world.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Saturday October 14 2017, @03:11AM
> If you had better financial training you'd know you shouldn't be playing the stock market.
You could not be more wrong. The stock market is the primary means the rich use to get richer. Just don't be stupid. DON'T PANIC. All you need do is dump your savings in the market after a crash, then ride the recovery. Buy low, sell high. Further, there are all kinds of tax breaks to make stocks even better. Profits on stocks are taxed at 15%, while wages get smacked with 25% and up. The Roth IRA is one of the biggest gifts to the rich, with all profit generated from that money being taxed not at 15%, but at 0%! Same story with the educational 529 plan. Use them! And don't wait for a crash to put a Roth to use, they're that good.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by driven on Saturday October 14 2017, @12:14AM (4 children)
Teach kids it's ok to disagree with someone. Teach them how to have a civil conversation with someone even when they disagree. Teach them that the world doesn't owe them anything. Teach them how to be a good neighbour.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 14 2017, @02:14AM (3 children)
Yes, let's increase the problem of schools being indoctrination facilities.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 14 2017, @03:04AM (2 children)
How is being a civilized human being "indoctrination"?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by t-3 on Saturday October 14 2017, @11:17AM (1 child)
Because your civilized is another's barbarian. Some things are parents' responsibility, schools shouldn't have so much foisted onto them because parents are lazy or incompetent.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 14 2017, @02:29PM
It's called CIVICS. There is a few ways to learn these
1. your family
2. your friends
but if you have fucked up family and you hang around fucked up people, then where do you learn it? Prison? Prison tends to be not such a good place to learn things.
It is should be responsibility of society to transfer generally accepted, good values to kids, at least as much as possible. We call this EDUCATION. This should include basic behavioural norms, especially for kids with fucked up families. When someone is stuck in a cesspit, it's better to throw them a rope when you are walking by, unless you prefer to get hit by shit instead.
(Score: 0, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 14 2017, @12:16AM (2 children)
FUckin roughneck, noone never leanrt you paragraphs.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 14 2017, @03:11AM (1 child)
If you want to get a quick smackdown and mostly get ignored, keep doing what you're doing.
If you want to get up-modded and get lots of replies, put some thought into your trolling and use your sockpuppets to give your posts an upboop or two.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 14 2017, @05:03PM
My reaction to the root poster was similar:
- Learn how to make a columnar list.
- Learn how to break up a text blob by using paragraph breaks.
.
From the list:
Learn how to prep a house for a hurricane
Doesn't this consist of
1) Get a house built with proper weatherstripping and heavy-duty storm shutters.
2) Close the shutters, windows, and doors when the storm is approaching.?
care for and teach an uncircumcised kid
It would be interesting as to how that made the list.
Wouldn't "teach the kid to wash himself thoroughly" cover it?
cursive
A dead skill.
When I want somebody to read something I write, I use what I learned in 1st grade.
(My aunt had handwriting so bad that it was practically cryptography.)
swim with eyes up/forward
You can't "teach" me to open my eyes when my face is wet.
Must have had an early traumatic event.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 14 2017, @01:19AM (3 children)
> Learn how to put out a fire.
Learn how to make a fire first, then learn how to put it out...
More generally, learn some of the basic skills required to live before the industrial revolution. Then learn how to do more modern things. If you have access to rural property, scouting isn't necessary (I hated the scouts, much too regimented for me).
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday October 14 2017, @01:26AM (1 child)
Shit man, firemaking is one of those things every boy knows by instinct, although more recent generations have been more adamant about suppressing that vestigial behavior.
Whether its nuking ants with a magnifying glass, burning up G.I. Joes with matches, hairspray torches, or pretty much anything with gasoline meant for the ol' lawn mower.
(Score: 3, Informative) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday October 14 2017, @10:47AM
Personally, I prefer the old indian fire-building trick. Goes over great with kids. You build the fire pile, have them bring you all kinds of fire-buildy type stuff, then light the fire with your cigarette lighter. When them complain you say: I'm old, I'm indian, I built a fire, and I tricked you. Old indian fire-building trick.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 14 2017, @06:14AM
If you hated the regimentation (you wild little rebel), you probably would have benefitted from being in the scouts and learning some discipline.
Conversely, those who love the regimentation and uniforms (little authoritarians in training) should be made to spend time in a hippie commune.
You learn best when pushed outside your social comfort zone.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Saturday October 14 2017, @01:51AM (12 children)
Learn to touchtype and to write well in cursive.
This one is wrong, on both counts. Cursive is obsolete, and downright stupid. It's hard as hell to read. People should be writing in plain print, even if it takes a bit longer to write. There's a reason you don't see engineering drawings in cursive, and typography is almost always in block letters (except for things like logos).
Touch typing is stupid too. They tried to teach us that when I was young, and it was garbage. The problem is the QWERTY keyboard. Keeping your fingers on the home row and moving them as necessary will just end up causing you pain because almost none of the letters you want to type are on the home row, and a bunch of them are below it, where it's hard to reach if you're using this rigid system. Don't touch-type; just teach yourself to type on your own in whatever way works best for you. And better yet, ditch the QWERTY keyboard and switch to something else, either Dvorak, Colemak, or Workman. With those you really can do something closer to the touch-typing ideal. But touch typing is dumb as long as everyone refuses to abandon their QWERTY keyboards.
Your list is pretty good otherwise, but you forgot to mention that kids need to be taught to use Linux as their primary OS. And how to change the oil in their car, and change the brake pads too.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 14 2017, @02:15AM
Touch typing is useful as long as everyone refuses to abandon their QWERTY keyboards.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 14 2017, @02:48AM (2 children)
I was careful not to merely have "write in cursive". It was "write well in cursive". The point is that most cursive is in fact hard as hell to read. It needn't be that way. For those with skill, cursive is fast and readable.
I'm a programmer. I mostly write in C and assembly, plus I do email and soylentnews. I pretty much touch type, not 100% standard due to hand injury. The typing lessons I took in high school are a positive influence to this day. I'm fast. I can blow past typical coworkers.
Linux is not just a random life skill. It goes with programming, graphing, statistics, etc. Focus on bash, make, R, octave, oocalc, and the numerous simple commands. (dd, xxd, cut, ps, head...)
I have mixed feelings about the oil change. People tend to dump oil in the soil or down the sewer or even into a septic tank. Used oil is a cancer risk. Oil filters can be absurdly hard to remove, needing two people (one above and one below) or even disconnecting major components. You may need to lift out the engine or dashboard.
I have to say "NO" to the brake pads. Don't fuck with that.
(Score: 2) by t-3 on Saturday October 14 2017, @11:23AM (1 child)
What? Brake pads are the easiest things to replace. Asked if it takes two people to change your oil, you're doing it wrong.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 15 2017, @06:03AM
First, the brake pads: you fuck that one up, people die
Next, consider the Chevy Celebrity. From above, you can just barely see the oil filter. You could poke it with a stick, but not get a wrench in there. From below, there is room for a wrench, but you can't see the oil filter and you can't get the leverage you need to even put the wrench over the oil filter. So the solution involves two people. The person above guides the person below, then assists with a long stick and/or a cord.
(Score: 2) by lx on Saturday October 14 2017, @04:44AM (2 children)
No need to put these skills down as "stupid" merely because you can't master them.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Saturday October 14 2017, @04:53PM (1 child)
QWERTY keyboards *are* stupid, it's a fact. Any scientific comparison of keyboard types will quickly show you QWERTY is horribly inefficient and very mechanically bad for your fingers (they have to move and contort too much). There's a reason Dvorak invented his keyboard decades ago, and why other keyboards have also been invented since then like Colemak. QWERTY is garbarge.
I touch type just fine on my Dvorak keyboard though.
(Score: 1) by toddestan on Saturday October 14 2017, @06:09PM
Dvorak is the whole reason I can touch type. After using it long enough, my fingers finally learned where all the letters are, to the point where I can touch type on a standard QWERTY keyboard that's been remapped to Dvorak by the OS. Since the labels on the physical keys are still QWERTY and almost no one seems to even know what Dvorak is let alone the actual layout, it pretty much guarantees that no one can actually use my computer.
Those alternative layouts like Colemak are interesting. As a long term Dvorak user I can agree about many of the warts in the Dvorak layout they point out. But I've been typing on Dvorak for longer than Colemak has been around. Geez, I'm old.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday October 14 2017, @10:51AM (4 children)
Unless whatever way works best for you gets you 90wpm or more, stfu and learn touch typing.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Saturday October 14 2017, @04:50PM (2 children)
I can easily exceed 90wpm. I can't do that with strict touch typing; it's a stupid system, because of the stupid QWERTY keyboard, and a great way to get a horrible case of RSI.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday October 14 2017, @06:13PM
Thus the "unless" clause of my statement. If you can manage it, more power to you.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 14 2017, @07:05PM
> I can easily exceed 90wpm
me too, look
wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww
filter won't be happy
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 14 2017, @05:21PM
I also smiled at GP's suggestion of switching to a different keyboard layout.
That's fine--until you encounter a kiosk.
Just for good measure, let's make it a well-used kiosk where the keyboard is QWERTY and the letters on the keys are worn away.
My county library runs Windoze (and Internet Exploder. Ugh!) and has their machines so locked down that even right-click is disabled.
Good luck telling that shit that you would like to use a different keyboard layout.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Saturday October 14 2017, @03:30AM (6 children)
Generally speaking, there's a lot of good stuff on your list. I find the opening gambit to be a bit odd, though:
This is the very first thing on your list? Given the various survivalist skills you mention, I think it deserves to be included. But the reality is that the ability of normal people (i.e., not trained police or military or gun fanatics who go to the range regularly) to respond well using a firearm in a tense situation is often greatly overestimated.
Again, not saying people shouldn't learn it. But it's telling that it's at the very tippy top of your long list.
No, you don't need that. Why the hell is that #2? Why would you want to short stocks? You do realize that the stock market is basically gambling for rich white people, right? Sure, there are insiders who skirt the rules to make a profit and others who are just plain lucky, but the vast majority of even professional fund managers have trouble maintaining consistent performance that beats the market overage over the long haul. You might as well put "be skilled at blowing on the dice to win at craps" as #3.
Maybe -- "learn the difference between volatile investments that are basically legalized gambling vs. knowing how to invest your money safely long-term in a way that won't leave you behind the average gain over time." THAT'S a useful skill to know, not fast-paced shorting and options trading.
So, we leave all the circumcised kids to the wolves?
(In all seriousness, kids with foreskins basically should be mostly left alone. If you're "caring" for them before they retract on their own, you're probably messing unnecessarily with your kid's junk, and possibly doing more harm than good. There's a lot of stupid misinformation about foreskin care and "normal" age for retraction that originated with some BS in the hygiene movement in the late 1800s and early 1900s, the same BS that led to widespread genital mutilation of infant boys in Western nations for decades.)
I think I know how to do the latter pretty well, but I'm pretty challenged at the former. :)
Wow... this segued into some pretty specific stuff. Have you had fertility issues in your relationships? Are you tired of having sex just for the fun of it during the "baby-making" phase? Not a bad skill to know, I guess, but if you're going to throw that in, perhaps teaching some skills about how to give pleasure to a woman before you go examining her cervix mucus texture might be in order. Just sayin'. We seem to have skipped directly from "How to greet/introduce people" and "how to get a date" to looking at mucus for baby-making. (Unless... maybe that "breast exam" was supposed to count as foreplay?)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 14 2017, @06:54AM (5 children)
Charting fertility is the most effective form of birth control when you're taught how to do it. I think that's what the original posting was trying to get at.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday October 14 2017, @10:52AM (4 children)
Beg to differ. Sodomy is more effective.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Funny) by chromas on Saturday October 14 2017, @03:49PM (1 child)
Well, if you're gonna be anal about it.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday October 14 2017, @06:14PM
You sure pulled that one right out of your ass.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 14 2017, @05:35PM (1 child)
Q: What do you call people who use the "rhythm" method of birth control?
A: Parents.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 15 2017, @06:14AM
The rhythm method is obsolete. It relies only on menstration and/or body temperature.
Newer methods rely on mucus examination. This is far more reliable. Mucus is judged according to color, transparency, ability to be stretched out without breaking, and slipperyness.
You can use it to make babies or to avoid them, or even just to know a due date or father in case a baby happens to be created.
As birth control, it fails when people blow off the signs and fuck condom-free anyway. This happens because an ovulating woman is especially horny. Note that women on hormonal birth control miss out on this entirely, and their relationships suffer the loss of it. Ovulation is simply the most enjoyable time to fuck.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 14 2017, @04:44AM
How to ride a horse, shoot straight, and tell the truth.