We have to stop asking schools to be responsible for 100% of the things we want our kids to learn.
I often see memes going around that suggest replacing or revising high school curricula. Suggestions might be along the lines of “Instead of trigonometry, teach personal finance.”
Setting aside the debate of whether pre-calculus is of more or less value than checkbook balancing (I think they’re both vital, if in slightly different situations), there’s a deeper and profoundly mistaken assumption underneath.
The scope of compulsory education and the percentage of children’s lives it takes up has grown over the decades. I think it’s reached a point where people are beginning to act as if school is the place where learning happens. If that’s the assumption, then the logical conclusion is to make sure that everything – everything – we want our kids to learn must be taught at school.
Learning is the default condition for all humans. If we stop learning, it’s because our culture has broken our innate curiosity in some way. Learning should be happening from morning to night, regardless of where we’re currently situated. Until we really understand that, we’ll keep demanding more of our educational institutions, and considering them failures whenever they don’t completely fill our kids’ brains with everything we want them to know.
Learning isn’t just for school.