Children should be taught life skills, such as good nutrition and how it impacts health. This could also be incorporated as part of science. Children currently learn a little bit about balanced diets during cookery lessons but they don’t learn in enough depth. They could learn about processed and ultra processed foods, essential fatty acids, harmful additives in food, and preservatives.
Other life skills could include managing money.
Does anyone have any other suggestions about which life skills should be taught?
How about things like sorting a load of washing, using a machine, folding and ironing clothes, making a bed, sorting recycling and putting rubbish out in collection bins (this could be done at home maybe?) gardening to grow healthy food from seed, even things like make a fire and cook a meal on it, poisonous plants to avoid, how to make a basic shelter outdoors if you live near rural or semi rural spaces, all these should be taught to all children preferably at primary level, it’s no good being able to google if a mass cyber attack collapses the internet or phone networks or both and a fair amount of adults wouldn’t have a clue either .
I think both of the ideas here are great. We definitely need to educate children how to eat properly! Not only would that reduce pressures on the NHS, but it would improve the welfare of people. However, I think this would perhaps be better taught in a PSE/Health & Wellbeing/ PE class as opposed to becoming science curriculum.
Snoopy mentions things our education system fails to teach younger people. I myself will be leaving secondary school in the coming months and can confirm these are crucial life skills not taught (in Scotland either where I am from). There are so many young people who enter adulthood with no idea how to do a wash, how to iron, or generally just be self-dependent. We need to instil our conservative family values in our education system so that children of the future know how to actually do things they need to do everyday, otherwise we face a “generation of dependent’s”. We must implement this across the United Kingdom, as too many are not taught these crucial skills!
The D&T curriculum covers cookery, including basic health and nutrition, and science further covers nutrition and health impacts. I’m surprised to hear it doesn’t cover things like food processing and additives. Is it a question of how the curriculum is interpreted and applied, rather than what it contains?
Personal finance is also explicitly covered, including budgeting, pensions, insurance, etc. Is this inadequate?
More broadly, while I’m in favour of better preparing children for the realities of adult life, I’m concerned that the education system — and by extension the state — increasingly assumes the responsibilities of parents. I can’t help feeling that it should be parents, not the state, to teach children how to launder their clothes and take the bins out.
Perhaps it depends on which school, teachers, or curriculum you end up with. Some of it looks better than it is in actual fact. My own children did not learn budgeting, tax or finance in school. I have observed lessons in finance in other schools which were very substandard and misleading, especially when discussing debt.
I do think that survival skills could be taught, though maybe outside school time in a club or by getting the armed forces in for a day here and there to run a project.
Botany and how to recognise safe and poisonous plants would be useful. Botany used to be taught in schools but was stopped before I went to school. Growing food is also important to learn and not everyone will learn this from their parents. Again, it could be a project, possibly linked to environmental science.
We have DT and CAD design in schools, which is good, though practical woodwork and making clothes no longer seems to be done. Children are told that they can design something but it will be made in China. So a bit of practice with practical skills is done but the emphasis is much more on design. If there is a conflict or trade war with China, we will need to make more of our own goods in the future. I like some of the academic subjects but there is a great imbalance with practical subjects and I question whether everything we teach children is useful or not.
Perhaps it depends on which school, teachers, or curriculum you end up with. Some of it looks better than it is in actual fact. My own children did not learn budgeting, tax or finance in school.
This is what I’m wondering. Which leads to another question: If the existing curriculum isn’t being taught properly, is adding more topics to it going to achieve the change you want?
I suspect not.
In which case:
The way in which school curriculum is imposed and managed doesn’t work. Assuming we want to control what is taught in our schools, and at what standard, that has to be fixed.
With specific regard to the life skills you raise, are there other and possibly better ways to teach them?
I understand your point entirely, but the reason I said laundry could be taught at school rather than at home, is personal experience… my husband and myself both worked two jobs to keep up with being able to pay for rent, two cars and one child. I rarely had time to spend with my child, and felt I should give him the best value in the time we could spend… luckily my mum looked after him a lot, but maybe there are fanilies out there who rely on childcare (and servicing the cost of this), there are also parents out there who are the complete opposite and they don’t work and they don’t keep house well, for various reasons they maybe have no control over, so the skills need to come from somewhere . I just think we should be teaching our kids to be functional adults before we teach them there are 170 genders and how to dye your hair in a rainbow of colours
How about an after school club for an hour? That could work? Getting the Army involved where they are nearby is a really good idea, they probably could teach all of the things I was thinking of.
Don’t forget there are thousands of veterans that are homeless and not given any priority for housing, maybe they could run as a business (paid for from per pupil budget maybe??) to get them an income and the ability to effect their own housing solution… worth thinking about??
Regarding the education about nutrition, I was partly thinking about the problem of obesity, which is a major problem in this country. My point about this is that there should be more information given in school lessons.
I learned a lot about this only when I paid a dietitian to help me lose weight, as an adult. She also taught me in depth about additives, essential fatty acids and cholesterol etc. I had thought I already understood what good nutrition was but I didn’t realise how unhealthy additives were and how often sugar is added to savoury foods like ham, nor that HDL and LDL should be balanced and what to eat to improve this. I think that people need to learn more about healthy eating while they are in school. Many children eat junk food and high caffeine energy drinks which make them hyperactive in school.
Handling money should be better taught in schools, including about debt, loans and HP. It could be part of business studies or maths.
Other life skills might be taught after school, perhaps in clubs, or just as topics throughout the school year.
I just don’t see a need to explicitly teach laundry, certainly not in schools. I was never shown how to do it. I assume I picked up the principles by observation, and filled in the blanks through necessity.
I agree with the broader point of teaching life skills, and especially finances. But as noted above I’m less convinced that simply adding things to the curriculum is the answer.
I do like your idea of getting ex-servicemen involved in schools, too. I frequently hear that boys today lack positive, male role models, and we certainly need more onward career opportunities for our armed forces.
Many children eat junk food and high caffeine energy drinks which make them hyperactive in school.
This is true, but experience leads me to doubt that lessons on cholesterol will change that.
Also, as noted above, judging by what’s currently in the curriculum these issues could already be taught. It’s just not clear that adding line items to the curriculum leads to qualitative change in classrooms.
Handling money should be better taught in schools, including about debt, loans and HP. It could be part of business studies or maths.
Again, this is already in the curriculum. If it isn’t being taught, then we have a different and rather more difficult problem to solve.
As no-one should be entering the education system with the aspiration of reaching adulthood to a life of state dependancy, School, in its entirety and not just from the age of 11, should be considered a Life-skills Apprenticeship, preparing each and all for their obligated future roles in shaping the society to which they will be expected to contribute. But then, under the old Grammar & Secondary Modern schooling system, isn’t this precisely the successful system we had until supplanted with Leftist fair-do’s progressivism from the early the 70’s?
For those who didn’t pass either their 11 or 13-plus, Secondary Moderns taught Domestic Science (or Home Economics), as a subject focused on practical skills related to household management and Arts like Cooking, Sewing, and Cleaning etc. Part of the curriculum alongside more traditional subjects like English, Maths, and Science, Domestic Science at this level aimed to equip students with the skills necessary for managing a home and also domestic careers, so why not return to something both tried and tested rather than create something new?
I had a friend who recently passed away at the age of about 80. He explained to me that, in his time, by the age of 16, everyone in his class at school knew in which direction they would be going. Basically, either a proper apprenticeship, or training for the professions or, if you were really bright, off to university. how do we get back to that?
I used to study Home Economics (cooking) but a more modern version could incorporate nutrition and budgeting, thriftiness and how to run a home, with all sorts of skills. How many young people know how to iron for example. My father was taught to iron when doing his national service, I still think bringing back a compulsory national service would be a good thing to discipline the unruly since being removed from the schooling system’ we’ve seen an epic rise in antisocial behaviour in our schools. The falklands have a system whereby the individuals strengths are identified and that then becomes their main subject focus, whether that’s maths or music. I think our current system fails children that perhaps would be better suited to a more creative or vocational aspiration.
I thought you were talking about practical skills like how to manage finances, start a business, apply for jobs or uni, and how to open a can if you haven’t got a modern can opener. What you are talking about here is a revamp of home economics with an inclusion of what the Americans would call a minor in nutritian. It’s a good idea, But this is not the meaning of the term life skills.
