Dear friends,
In Letter #119, I asked two sets of questions:
1. When you think back on your secondary schooling (middle school or high school) what course or lesson seems most valuable to you now, in the sense that it has somehow enriched your life? How has it enriched your life? Do you believe such a course or lesson is sufficiently useful that it should be part of the required school curriculum?
2. When you think back about the years of your secondary schooling, what do wish had been part of the curriculum that was not? What course or lesson might have helped you best as you entered independent adulthood? Given that we have compulsory education with required courses, do you think that course or lesson should be among the requirements?
Forty-two people responded in the comments, 35 of whom gave answers to one or both of these questions. Here I will briefly summarize those answers and then present my own thoughts about life-valuable lessons.
Twenty-three of those who commented cited at least one course they took in secondary school that they have found to add valuable to their life. The courses listed covered a wide range. The only specific course mentioned by more than two people was typing (or keyboarding), mentioned by 6. Six others mentioned courses that fell into a category I labeled broadly as household skills, including home economics, cooking and nutrition, consumer education, and tool use. Some noted that these courses were not recommended to them in the academic track, but they took them anyway as electives. Four people mentioned courses that improved their ability to speak publicly (labeled oral communication, speech and debate, public speaking, and drama). Only 7 out of the 23 mentioned a course that we usually think of as standard academics. Those were world literature, history, English, French, Spanish, and precalculus. Nobody claimed to believe that the courses they found to be valuable should be required. Not surprisingly, most readers of this Substack agree that coercion spoils learning.
Twenty-four of those who commented listed courses they wished had been available to them when they were in secondary school. It was apparently easier to think of these than to think of courses that were part of their curriculum and were valuable. The number of courses listed per person in response to this second question ranged from 1 to 8, with a mean of 3.6. In contrast, the number listed per person in response to the first question ranged from 1 to 4, with a mean of 1.6. And that doesn’t include those who said or implied that none of the courses they took were valuable.
To make sense of the rather large lists of wished-for courses, I categorized them into six groups, which I list below:
• Emotional and Social Wellbeing. Thirteen people listed at least one course in this category. Some of the specific ones listed were mindfulness, self-management, kindness, meditation, group decision making, trauma management, social skills, understanding others, empathy, nonviolent communication, conflict resolution, controlling stress, self-awareness, and science of relationships.
• Home Economics and Home Maintenance. Twelve people listed at least one course in this category. Some of the specific ones listed were home economics, home maintenance, cooking, meal planning, growing food, nutrition, tool use and repair, and fixing things.
• Practical Financial Information and Skills. Twelve people listed at least one course in this category. Among the specific ones listed were understanding finances, economics, accounting, financial planning, practical math, filing taxes, money skills, capitalism, and financial literacy,
• Critical Thinking and Logic. Eight people listed at least one course in this category. Among them were critical thinking, critical writing, applied logic, ethical reflection, executive function, Fermi estimation, reasoning, and learning to learn.
• Understanding Humans, Society, and Social Diversity. Six people listed at least one course in this category. Among them were history of human societies, world cultures, social studies, comparative religions, and human history starting with earliest Homo sapiens.
• Miscellaneous. Eight people listed at least one item that did not fit any of the above categories. Among these were computer programming, ecology, earth science, physiology and disease, systems theory, drawing and painting, and swimming.
For whatever it may be worth, here is a list I came up with, of courses I think should be available to everyone of secondary school age. (I generated a longer list, but this is all I have energy for right now.) I list them not in an order of judged importance but in the order they occurred to me as I was thinking about the question.
• Swimming. I’m probably biased here because of a long life on the water. Red Cross swimming is the only course my mother ever insisted I take. I was five years old at the time and still remember the struggle of learning the skill of rhythmically exhaling under water and inhaling out of water—an essential skill for feeling comfortable in water. My mother wanted to make sure I would never drown and would enjoy life on any of the 11,000 lakes for which Minnesota (where we lived) is famous. I am grateful for that. I learned early to be comfortable in the water and my life has been enriched by that ever since. I became a lifeguard on a Duluth beach when I was 16 and for four summers after that I was waterfront director and swimming instructor at summer camps. Today kayaking on rivers, lakes, and sometimes the ocean is among my greatest outdoor pleasures.
Surveys show that approximately 15% of American adults report that they cannot swim. Those people are in danger whenever they are in a boat or on a pier over water. Every year roughly 4,000 Americans die from unintentional drowning. That, admittedly, amounts to a small percentage of accidental deaths (dwarfed by deaths from auto accidents), but it is significant and largely preventable. Even more significant is that people who can’t swim, or can barely swim, are, by avoiding lakes, rivers, and oceans, missing out on joyful water adventures. Columbia College, where I was an undergraduate, had and still has a requirement for graduation that students (barring physical handicaps) prove they can swim at least 75 yards. Those who enter unable to do so must take lessons until they can. I felt at the time, and still feel, that swimming was the only Columbia College requirement that made sense. I would not oppose a policy requiring it for graduation from public high schools.
• CPR (Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation). Perhaps the most important things for people to learn are things that promote safety without detracting from adventure. Our schools might be more useful if they were run by the Red Cross rather than by people trained in “education.” On a statistical basis, in terms of lives saved, knowing CPR is even more important than swimming. Much more. According to the American Heart Association, CPR saves roughly 32,000 to 36,000 lives per year in the U.S. (here). It would save even more lives if more people knew how to do it.
• Home Economics. Back in the gender differentiated world of my school days, Home Ec was a course taken by all girls and Shop was a course taken by all boys. I’d like to see a revival of these, but without the gender segregation and with a twist toward all the practical skills involved in maintaining a household. We have way too many adults today who don’t know how to plan nutritious meals, or cook, or properly maintain a home, or raise their own vegetables, or fix things around the house such as leaky faucets. A result is that too many people are wasting money eating non-nutritious food out or ordering it delivered, hiring people to make small repairs they should be able to do easily themselves, hiring landscaping companies with big noisy machines to mow their little lawns, and on and on. There is joy in doing these things yourself and much money to be saved. Learning in secondary school how to do these things would allow people to live happier, healthier lives, on a smaller budget.
• Mathematics of Money Management. Speaking of budgets…. Most Americans are terrible at money management. They spend money on things they don’t need or even enjoy, run up debts and waste money on interest, avoid saving for retirement, and can’t manage tax forms. Imagine a course that teaches young people how to solve story problems such as the following: “If instead of spending $25,000 on a wedding you spent just $5,000 and invested the difference in a fund earning 8% a year, compounded annually, how much would that be worth by the time you retire, in 50 years?” (Spoiler: The answer is $926,385.88). Similar story problems could be about money lost paying credit card debt, or a more complicated one on whether a college education is worth it on purely financial grounds, depending on certain reasonable assumptions.
The course would emphasize the value of budgeting and always remaining within budget. I recall long ago reading a quote by some famous person that went something like this: “Earn X dollars a month and spend one more than X a month, and you live with stress and worry. Earn X dollars a month and spend one less than X a month, and you live happily and luxuriously.” While on the topic of quotes about mismanaged money, one of my favorites is an old one from Will Rogers: “Too many people spend money they haven’t earned to buy things they don’t want to impress people they don’t like.” The people who benefit from our ignorance, of course, are the financial companies that lend money and the people who sell us stuff that we do not need and do not add joy to our lives.
• Probability and Statistical Reasoning. Aside from math related to money management, the most useful mathematics for most people have to do with principles of probability and statistics. A course on this could focus on many practical applications. One, related to money management, has to do with gambling. Currently, with the promotion of sports betting, huge numbers of people (including teens) are throwing money away, believing they can beat the system when they can’t. The same is true with state lotteries and all varieties of casino gambling. The systems are rigged so the chance of coming out ahead in the long run is nearly nil. The only sorts of gambling where skill is involved are those where there is no “house” running it to make money. A skilled poker player or pool shark who knows how to hustle might make money from those foolish enough to play with him or her, but otherwise gambling is nearly always a losing proposition. The course I have in mind would show why. Next to alcohol and other drug addictions, gambling is the surest way to ruin yourself and your family.
Beyond understanding the pitfalls of gambling, statistical reasoning would help people make other life choices. Concerning dangers that people fear and that limit their lives or their children’s lives, what is the likelihood of each danger? Instead of allowing scare stories to control our lives and our children’s, we should look for reliable data on actual probabilities. For example, on average, what is the probability of an 8-year-old getting a serious injury (or being sexually abused) playing an adult-directed sport compared to the chance of their getting a serious injury (or being sexually abused) playing with friends outdoors away from adult control?
The course could also help us think more critically and rationally about the uses of numbers by advertisers or by those who are trying to promote a particular idea or point of view. Even scientists often present their data in ways that make an effect seem bigger or more reliable than it truly is. When I was teaching statistics to social science majors at Boston College, I supplemented the main textbook with a little paperback, published in 1954, entitled How to Lie with Statistics. It was written by Darrell Huff and is still available. That would be a great book to include in a high school course. If everyone read it, we would all be wiser consumers of statistics-based claims slung at us every day.
• Skepticism. A more general course aimed at dealing with the information and misinformation slung at us every day might be called Skepticism or Critical Thinking. In this world of scams, exaggerations, and lies coming from our top officials on down, how do we know what to believe, or what to credit as “likely true,” “possibly true,” or “clearly false?” How do we distinguish among truth tellers, people who think they are truth tellers but are mistaken or ignorant, and out-and-out liars? Skepticism has become a clear survival skill. To be honest, it’s (sadly) way more important than swimming. There is no easy formula for distinguishing truth from error and error from lies, but there are lots of ways to help make those distinctions. There are lots of questions we should ask before making an important decision (such as whether to vaccinate a child) based on somebody’s claim. I imagine a course here in which students investigate claims made by advertisers, politicians, scientists, and social media influencers and hold debates about the veracity of the claims. What information must you gather to test the veracity?
• The Interdependent Web of Life. The course could also be called Ecology. For the long-term welfare of humanity on Earth, we need a populace that understands the interdependence of living beings and natural non-living entities and the disruptive effects of our human activity. We are already seeing disastrous effects of fossil fuel use, throw-away plastics, and the like, yet we continue our reckless ways. Ignorance or deliberate head-in-the-sand behavior may shorten our lives as individuals and as a species.
It seems strange, or should seem strange, that we have a compulsory education system that teaches stuff quite divorced from people’s real lives and needs, stuff that is learned just long enough to pass the test, by students who see no other purpose for learning it. If kids must go to school, we should at least be offering lessons that are likely to improve their lives in the long run. Here, readers who commented on Letter #119 and I have offered some suggestions about courses students might find valuable. (Of course, now I’m sure the public education monopolistic bureaucracy will jump to it and reform the curriculum.)
I’m not yet done with this topic. If you, after reading this, have further thoughts about useful curriculum reform in public schools, I’d love to read them. Put your thoughts into the comments section below. All comments written respectfully are treated respectfully by me and other readers, whether we agree or disagree. Indeed, disagreements can be especially thought-provoking and valuable. I do value reasoned skepticism!
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With respect and best wishes,
Peter
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