Comment by SilasX
18 days ago
I mean ... once you put it that way, yes, I'm actually willing to bite that bullet! (Or at least a cleaned-up, steelmanned version of it.)
It's vanishingly unlikely that any student who learns "personal finance", with no practical application, is going to retain it for the 5+ years until they'll actually need to use it. Learning doesn't work that way -- with, as you note, a few exceptions for unusually motivated students ... who would probably be able to learn it on their own when the time comes.
Ditto for the famous meme about "why don't schools teach something useful, like doing my taxes?" Because it would come across as an ungrounded, garbled mess that you'd forget by the time it was actually relevant.
So yes, I'd say that generally, education should work by grounding lessons in some kind of practical application. And indeed, like the other comments note, that's how it works for some of your other examples, like actually cooking something for home ec, or doing CPR on a dummy (which mimics most of the dynamics of the real thing, even if imperfectly).
I think there's a real human need being expressed by the common complaint, "When are we ever gonna use this stuff?" I'd phrase it as, "You're not grounding this material in a way that allows me to reason about it, and what's important vs isn't."
So, to the extent that we want to prepare students for "the real world" -- in particular, things like "doing your taxes" and "evaluating a car loan" -- I'd say the best way to address it would be by teaching the (meta-)skill of "learning an unknown domain". (Yes, "learning how to learn" ... but as an explicit skill, not one applied to material that is itself too artificial.) That's something you could apply to practical problems, even if they're not the same ones students will be solving later.
Applying this insight to the teaching of literary analysis: frame it as refuting an internet comment that doesn't understand that a song is a metaphor.
In fact, one thing that frustrates me about how the teach estimation in math is that they teach a useless version of it: you do something that takes about as long as calculating the exact value, except you add some rounding steps because you're told you can't give an exact answer. What you should instead do is give a timed test, which much more problems that usual, and only require approximate answers. Then you're forced to save time by rounding.
Late edit:
>Using the logic underpinning this article, the only things taught in school should be how to play video games, how to find the best parties and how to get laid; since those are the only things actually relevant to students at that stage of their life.
Yes, it does annoy me when the education system neglects the teaching of some skills that don't come naturally to some students, but not other skills.
I think this debate about utility misses some of the functions of education that the Romans (like Aulus Gellius and Macrobius) discuss: they talk about education having three parts, namely utility, pleasure, and "cultitavtion" or "culture" (for lack of a better English word). Yes, some education does have direct practical application (utility) in life, but that alone is not sufficient. And, education must include pleasure and teach one how to take pleasure in things, or else it becomes an oppressive training in servility. But the third element, "cultivation," is the one that people today most often overlook. It's the Roman word for tilling soil, which you do not because it makes plants grow (that's sowing seeds) but because it prepares the ground for plants to grow when you do sow them. There are some educational activities that do not have direct and immediate utility but do open up new capabilities that can lead to future utility. Learning geometric constructions, for example, may not have immediate practical utility, but it may prepare the mind for trigonometry. Grade school art class never made anyone a Michelangelo or Monet, but learning to hold a brush or sculpt clay does promote fine motor skills that will enable one hold a pen later in education or maybe, with more practice, a scalpel in medical school.
Financial literacy for those who do not yet have wealth to manage, even if it doesn't seem practical in the moment, still opens up new capabilities to enable future growth.
>I think this debate about utility misses some of the functions of education that the Romans (like Aulus Gellius and Macrobius) discuss: they talk about education having three parts, ...
Sure, but I was making that point in the context of a discussion that accepted the premise that we do want kids to be good at a practical skill (personal finance) and we want to know how to best adapt schools to achieve that.
> But the third element, "cultivation," is the one that people today most often overlook. It's the Roman word for tilling soil, which you do not because it makes plants grow (that's sowing seeds) but because it prepares the ground for plants to grow when you do sow them. There are some educational activities that do not have direct and immediate utility but do open up new capabilities that can lead to future utility. Learning geometric constructions, for example, may not have immediate practical utility, but it may prepare the mind for trigonometry.
It seems like you're agreeing with my point there, about the need to ground the knowledge in what it will be used for, and thus some meaningful criteria for whether you're doing it right, that you can reason able. See my paragraph about "When are we ever going to use this stuff?": yes, it would tremendously help to teach tilling soil with an eye for "which tillings will actually make the soil receptive for seeds?" because then it would make a ton more sense why they're telling you to do it one way vs another!
>Grade school art class never made anyone a Michelangelo or Monet, but learning to hold a brush or sculpt clay does promote fine motor skills that will enable one hold a pen later in education or maybe, with more practice, a scalpel in medical school.
And again, you're agreeing about the need for practical application of a skill (actually using the brush).
>Financial literacy for those who do not yet have wealth to manage, even if it doesn't seem practical in the moment, still opens up new capabilities to enable future growth.
No, the issue is that it won't -- unless it hooks into some meaningful understanding that prevents it from folding into "useless esoterica where you have to guess the correct answer and then forget about over time", that most education falls into the trap of.
There’s an interesting difference between learning how to do taxes and learning how to evaluate an auto loan, in that the latter is often adversarial. Thousands of highly-paid experts spend their days figuring out how to get you to take on more debt and pay more fees and interest. With taxes, you might have Intuit or whoever trying to get you to buy prep services you don’t need, but it’s small potatoes by comparison. You can at least get unbiased tax info directly from the source. Nobody from the IRS will try to upsell you on a seat massager option that’s only $10/month more (and it extends the loan term by two years but let’s just gloss over that).
I’m not sure exactly what it means here, but I think there’s a big difference when it comes to teaching people how to learn things that powerful vested interests want them not to know.
Agreed. And the article talks about that some:
>Most personal finance math is basic arithmetic – the same arithmetic that most of our students currently struggle with. The hard part is everything else: impulse control, peer pressure, status anxiety, and the fundamental uncertainty of the future.
>Teaching teenagers about compound interest won’t help them resist the urge to keep up with their friends’ spending any more than teaching them about calories will stop them from eating junk food.
Still, you can at least separate out those skills as being independently worth teaching: how to figure out the impact on your budget, and the social dynamics driving your options.
I don’t think this is right. Teaching compound interest will help them resist that urge. What it won’t do is guarantee success, but there’s enormous benefit in just helping. This sentence mixes “help” with “stop,” suggesting that either something is useless or it’s bulletproof.
People can and do modify their choices based on their knowledge of the consequences. Yes, even teenagers, sometimes.
But for these examples, I think you also need to teach them that they’re doing battle with people who want them to make bad choices. People who spend their lives studying how to get them to make bad choices. Don’t just teach them about compound interest. Tell them how credit card companies try to trick you into suffering from it. Tell them how car salespeople will focus on the monthly payment and do their best to obfuscate the total cost. Tell them how junk food makers abuse psychology to make you want their product.
Teenagers love being contrary. We should take advantage of this tendency. The other guys certainly are.
> Most personal finance math is basic arithmetic
Most personal finance is understanding that anyone offering you financial services wants to make money with your money, no matter what they say or how nice they seem.
In some cases, they won't actually reduce the amount you have claim to (like banks holding your money), but will make their money with your money. In other cases, they will take some (hopefully) small percentage of the gain in value of your money, supposedly (and sometimes rightfully) as compensation for the work they claim to have done. In the worst cases, they will gamble with your money in a way that ensures that they never lose, but you may.
Understanding these human factors in real world personal finance comes, in my book, before anything else.