My comment to a friend's long fb rant about how to improve high school education

My friend's OG post, in response to an "improving education" icon-graph chart: "I have some ideas on all this. Parents and teachers should have the responsibility of helping with this and solidifying these skills to some degree.

The self defense portion should be incorporated into Physical Education. Let’s be real here, how many times do we really need to run around the gym and play dodgeball? Also with basic self defense techniques should include deescalation of violence.

Home Economics should not include just cooking, but social etiquette(alongside on how to set a table up).

I say we should phase out wood-shop and change that to add the basic home repair and car maintenance. The trade programs should be their own category that one can choose from to get into an apprenticeship post-graduation.

Personal Finance, Taxes and Insurance should be a class of its own.

Survival Skills should be an elective and not a requirement to make room for more day-to-day life skills.

Public speaking should be strictly an elective. Plenty of people with an internet connection on their phones who spout off BS all the time and do so with the most confidence and the echo chamber of strangers with the same opinions to inflate their egotism.

Coding should be an elective and not a requirement.

Stress management should be incorporated into Health class."

My comment: Yes to all of that. I agree! Great ideas, Travis, way better well articulated than I could be able to express on my own. I, too, have lots of ideas for improving high school requirements and curricula options, including but not limited to Humanities instead of separating Social studies from English, Exploration of World Languages for 1 yr as a stand-in for foreign language (say Spanish1 or Japanese1 doesn't go well and a student doesn't wanna continue, but they still want to get the minimum 2yrs to graduate). Exploration would offer project based learning to explore other languages and partnership with local foreign restaurants for students to be able to immerse themselves in an internship to improve their language and general knowledge skills in that language. Could be like a Mediterranean restaurant for learning Arabic/Turkish/Greek, Italian restaurant for Italian, French bakery for French, and so on and so forth for other languages. Getting community businesses involved in high school courses, every class and course available is sponsored by an individual business, willing to offer 2-6 internship positions for students per semester.

Submitted November 19, 2023 at 01:57AM by bebespeaks https://ift.tt/dSQuZ9q