What Students Need to Learn

Following up from yesterday's post about the community colleges, years of familiarity with our students has really settled me on some classes I feel ought to be essential for everyone who goes to school in the United States. I'm not talking just about academics, but about things a person needs to know to live a happy and productive life. With our large and growing underclass, we need to understand that more and more young people are simply not getting these life lessons at home. There is a huge correlation between a single-parent, low-income childhood and incarceration, substance abuse, unwed pregnancy, premature death, and so on.

Here are some of the classes I think everybody needs.

Health and Wellness. This includes hygiene, nutrition, exercise and first aid. People need to hear that a double cheeseburger and fries every day will kill them before they are 50. Heaven knows they hear and see enough messages every day telling them to scarf down the burgers, beer, soda and candy. We have an obesity/diabetes epidemic? Is anyone surprised? Gigantic benefits for people's lives and for society down the road

Human Relations. Members of any society need to understand the rules of common courtesy and expectations. Family dynamics could be improved immensely if people learned how to discuss things in psychologically appropriate ways. Sex, raising children, and all that jazz in this class too. This class would reduce crime, violence, divorce, child abuse and just a whole lot of human misery in general. The payoff for society would be huge.

Something vocational or domestic. It could be carpentry, cooking, gardening, appliance repair, plumbing, sewing, or the like. Yes, even academic-minded college-prep students could use some of these skills around the house or in their future lives as suburban homeowners. Some would find a path to vocational careers, too. Not everybody needs to get an academic degree, and millions of vocationally-minded teens see little reason to stay in school if white-collar directed courses are all that are taught. Remember, no more than 25% of jobs will require a college degree for the foreseeable future. Serve your customers' needs or you will lose them. This is not a new concept.

Consumer Math. People need to see how much they will wind up paying for things if they run up credit card debt. How much income it takes to afford an apartment. A house. How to do their taxes. How much various jobs pay. They need to learn about insurance, including medical, auto, home and life. We need to have savvy consumers who have a realistic appraisal of what they need to do to afford to live in society and are proficient enough not to get scammed by all the predators out there in the market. This shouldn't wait until the senior year of high school. It should be in junior high or the freshman year. The average person does not need fancy abstract math. But they sure as heck need this. Our society is structured so that it depends on them knowing it. But look at the foreclosure rate. So let's see that they do.