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Oct 23, 2018
2:59:17pm
gwalker All-American
What is the purpose of education? IMO, the answer to that question has a large
role in determining educational priorities. IMO, education should have three purposes: 1) To teach people how to think and how to learn and evaluate on their own, 2) To teach people skills that will be relevant in producing income, and 3) To enrich and expand the human experience. I'm not sure, but I'd probably put them in that order of priority.

Given those priorities, IMO, it would be foolish to eliminate reading books from the curriculum. Classroom experiences with reading books are nearly always designed to teach kids how to receive and evaluate information on a level that is deeper than Twitter and its 240 character limit. Many correctly point out all the problems with civility and poor communication that happen in today's world because people already don't get past that shallow level of communication, thinking and interpretation. Do we really want people who are unable to evaluate the trustworthiness of their news sources? Unable to ask what information the reporter isn't including that perhaps should be included? Unable to see how data might be presented in a misleading way? If anything, we need to push back more toward some of the traditional teaching that has been eroded.

My wife is educated as a math teacher. Aside from doing student teaching, all of her math instruction has been tutoring kids from third grade through calculus. Kids often ask, "Am I ever going to use this in 'real life?'" Some of the things she helps them learn will never pop up in their future. But the skills they develop to solve the problems and the expansion of their ability to think will definitely be useful.

With respect to foreign language, which isn't required by many school districts anyway, if you know another language well, you know your own language better.

Personal finance instruction is a good idea and very helpful for many. In Utah, it is required curriculum. It's also something that most kids who are going to go to college find incredibly boring (they could learn everything that is taught in the class in one week, but they have to attend for half of a year).
gwalker
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gwalker
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Related Threads Topic: Unpopular opinion alert: I don't think schools should focus on reading books. (Supercoug, Oct 23, 2018 at 2:03pm)

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