In a testament to the stories we tell ourselves, 24-year-old Rhiannon Weisz is currently filing her taxes and grumbling about how “school never taught us the important, useful things,” as if she remembers literally anything from school at all.
“It’s just so frustrating that we had to learn a
School in Norway teaches you basic woodworking, how to cook and in math we even had an assignment where we had to find a job and create a monthly/yearly budget based on that job, taking into account loan from car, house, etc…
Does the US have nothing like that?
The important thing to realize here is that “does the US…” is almost a meaningless category to ask about (at least as far as education is concerned), because each of the 50 different states manages its schooling requirements very differently. Potential course offerings and curriculum are often completely the authority of the individual school districts. So it’s almost impossible to ask any given sweeping generalization question about the US school system.
Canada.
In grade school (grade 6 I think) I recall an assignment where we got assigned a job from a card deck and had to build a budget to live on with it, had to consider upkeep and the like too.
For highschool, Tech classes were mandatory in grade 9 but I took woodshop and comp sci for as long as I could, dropping woodshop in the upper years.
Grade 10 had a split course, 1/2 was economics, did mock job applications and budgeting, the other half waa civics where we learned about the Westminster system and how our system differs from the states. That one sticks out even 18 years later as the teacher actually pushed critical thinking and encouraged constructive discussion.
I wish civics was taught for longer, there are far too many Canadians who don’t understand our system, side effect of bordering a country 10x your size with a massive global presence. I know a lot of people who only consume US news media and have no clue what’s happening on their side of the fence
Ours had all of that. I think many of the bad things you hear about US education is mostly a concerted narrative to try to denigrate the importance of publicly funded schools. IE to reduce funding and line private schools pockets.
I went to school in a rural part of a blue state and I had a similar experience to you. Woodworking and cooking were options but they were electives.
One of my high school math classes had a similar career and budgeting project. Most kids didn’t take it seriously. Like teenagers tend to do because they’re annoying teenagers.
Just speaking of my own experience, woodworking and cooking were optional. A class where you have to do that whole exercise of finding a job, learning how to budget for a car and house was mandatory. There were a few different classes that did that, but you had to take at least one of them.
Outside of the traditional classes (math, reading/writing, history, science, other languages), we had a few levels of woodworking, cooking, childcare, electronics, auto working, ceramics, painting, “technology”, music, and probably a couple more categories. There obviously isn’t enough time in the day to do all of them, so you’d have to prioritize.
It has the woodworking.
Speak for yourself, the only woodworking at my school was in the bathrooms.
My highschool had a bunch of classes based around welding and working with metal