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Education overhaul

2

Replies

  • snowflake954
    snowflake954 Posts: 8,400 Member
    I guess my question would be why now? Kids used to learn these things that the OP is pushing outside of school. What happened? Family meals don't exist anymore. Society has changed and that's the problem. The schools can't fill in all the gaps.
  • cgvet37
    cgvet37 Posts: 1,189 Member
    NovusDies wrote: »
    cgvet37 wrote: »
    It starts at home. Normally, if parents are obese, so are the children. The kids think it's ok because Mom and Dad do it.

    I doubt that the problem is the kids thing obesity is okay because of their parents... at least not for long. It is the habits they may think are normal and okay. The same habits the parents may at times struggle to break are the habits the kids are learning to mimic. It is the difference between cause and short term effect (food pleasure) and cause and long term effect (weight gain) that seems to be a struggle point. If the habit is pleasurable that makes it seem right and good. It is living for right now instead of living for the future. This is not an isolated problem and it is not contained to food habits.

    You can't rely on the parents until that 95 percent failure to lose and sustain it reverses significantly. If the parents do not know how to manage their weight they can't possible teach their kids.

    Exactly, habits. Kids learn from the parents. If a parent has unhealthy habits, the kids will learn those habits.
  • snowflake954
    snowflake954 Posts: 8,400 Member
    I guess my question would be why now? Kids used to learn these things that the OP is pushing outside of school. What happened? Family meals don't exist anymore. Society has changed and that's the problem. The schools can't fill in all the gaps.

    Well, parents used to have the time. Middle and upper class moms and a lot of working class moms stayed home. Their preschool kids got the important basic civilization from someone who considered it her job to get him ready to go to school. She had time to make meals from scratch, garden, and preserve the food she'd grown. It was possible for a man to support a wife and family on the salary he'd make as a high school graduate. And he had time when he got off work to do woodworking, save money by changing his own oil, and put on new brakes himself. And because the kids were around, they learned. No one ever sat me down and taught me how to make jam or can it. I can do it because I spent evenings and weekends and summer days gardening beside my parents and learning how to home-can foods safely.

    But when both partners in the marriage work eight hours, with an hour or hour and a half commute added on... when kids have two hours of homework after school, plus the various extra classes and sports they need to do to have a "well-rounded" college application.... when housework and homemaking and the emotional labor of the family is squeezed in wherever anyone has time to do a half-kittened job of it.... there's no time to learn those things. And no time to learn things like how to handle frustration when a tool breaks or something doesn't go right, or how to get enjoyment out of ordinary hard work.

    I'm not saying women need to get out of the working world. Not at all. I am saying that we should pay the workers of the world enough to support the family on, make jobs flexible so that parents can combine paid work with the work of raising future taxpayers if they want to, and make it possible for a parent to stay home as needed with small children without being punished for it by Social Security or by losing their health insurance. And, of course, all children should be wanted and desired by their parents, and there should be a way for people to learn how to parent without repeating the toxic or abusive patterns of the previous generation.

    Exactly--society has changed.
  • Latrellis
    Latrellis Posts: 72 Member
    Remember Michelle Obama's school lunch revision to get the kids healthy? And the kids threw away the food and wouldn't eat it? And what do you think they were eating at home? If one has time to go out to eat, they can make their meals (or like some of us did/do, cook a week's worth of dinners/lunches on Sunday & freeze).
  • Theoldguy1
    Theoldguy1 Posts: 2,427 Member
    Theoldguy1 wrote: »
    I definitely agree it should be taught at school, as well as balancing a budget, pros and cons of owning a home vs renting, how to buy and take care of a car. It would be great if these things were taught at home, but they’re not always. There should be a class called “Adulting” and these things should be included.

    I'm actually going as far as to say overhaul the whole system - screw reading pride and prejudice and learning trig (those should be electives), we're going for a group run and then we're going to make steak and eggs and learn how to change a spark plug.

    There's something so incredibly depressing to me about the proposal that we should decide to ditch the entire traditional concept of education and instead just focus on basic skills to maintain life. I don't believe we need schools if all they're going to be offering is instructions on how to cook eggs and execute basic mechanical tasks.

    I don't think @youcantflexcardio was saying ditch the traditional concept of education, just put in a few requirements for life skills.

    If you're making traditional subjects like reading, literature, and math purely elective, that's a major shift in focus from our traditional public school focus of attempting to ensure that students have the same academic foundation.

    Speaking from a US perspective, this has always been the ideal. We haven't always achieved it, but I don't agree that we should give it up to teach egg cookery and go for group runs.

    No not what I propose. I'm saying some exposure to "life skills" in addition to the "traditional" curriculum. Our kid's HS had mandatory personal finance, health, cooking and "shop". Each was a quarter during the freshman year. Over 95% of the students from the school go to college so the life skills classes didn't have a negative impact on their education.

  • lemurcat2
    lemurcat2 Posts: 7,899 Member
    Theoldguy1 wrote: »
    Theoldguy1 wrote: »
    I definitely agree it should be taught at school, as well as balancing a budget, pros and cons of owning a home vs renting, how to buy and take care of a car. It would be great if these things were taught at home, but they’re not always. There should be a class called “Adulting” and these things should be included.

    I'm actually going as far as to say overhaul the whole system - screw reading pride and prejudice and learning trig (those should be electives), we're going for a group run and then we're going to make steak and eggs and learn how to change a spark plug.

    There's something so incredibly depressing to me about the proposal that we should decide to ditch the entire traditional concept of education and instead just focus on basic skills to maintain life. I don't believe we need schools if all they're going to be offering is instructions on how to cook eggs and execute basic mechanical tasks.

    I don't think @youcantflexcardio was saying ditch the traditional concept of education, just put in a few requirements for life skills.

    If you're making traditional subjects like reading, literature, and math purely elective, that's a major shift in focus from our traditional public school focus of attempting to ensure that students have the same academic foundation.

    Speaking from a US perspective, this has always been the ideal. We haven't always achieved it, but I don't agree that we should give it up to teach egg cookery and go for group runs.

    No not what I propose. I'm saying some exposure to "life skills" in addition to the "traditional" curriculum. Our kid's HS had mandatory personal finance, health, cooking and "shop". Each was a quarter during the freshman year. Over 95% of the students from the school go to college so the life skills classes didn't have a negative impact on their education.

    Jane wasn't responding to some proposal you made, but this:
    I definitely agree it should be taught at school, as well as balancing a budget, pros and cons of owning a home vs renting, how to buy and take care of a car. It would be great if these things were taught at home, but they’re not always. There should be a class called “Adulting” and these things should be included.

    I'm actually going as far as to say overhaul the whole system - screw reading pride and prejudice and learning trig (those should be electives), we're going for a group run and then we're going to make steak and eggs and learn how to change a spark plug.

    Personally, I absolutely would oppose making English classes and trig electives and spending the time one should spend on learning college prep type subjects on life skills, if you had to sacrifice one for the other. But I have no objection to a mandatory life skills type class that lasts a year in 9th grade. My own high school had "personal finance" as a required semester, although you could substitute econ and most college bound kids did (I did, and learned personal finance fine on my own, but I believe there are kids who benefitted from it). We also had a year and a half of required PE (you could pick a different type of sport or exercise per semester, so it really did involve getting exercise) also. The rest of the things you mention were all electives for us (health was mandatory in jr high, but mostly I remember it being about the horrors of drugs, although I expect there was more, including nutrition), but I think cooking and shop (if co-ed rather than one for girls and one for boys, like back in my mom's day) would fit in. Both lend themselves to some academic things, also -- some discussion of the science of cooking could actually help turn some kids on to science.
  • LB30
    LB30 Posts: 109 Member
    I guess my question would be why now? Kids used to learn these things that the OP is pushing outside of school. What happened? Family meals don't exist anymore. Society has changed and that's the problem. The schools can't fill in all the gaps.

    I think this is spot on. Society has and is changing and it is a constant struggle to keep up. And, technology is both the blessing and the curse on this, and many other, issues.

    We are all super busy. We want things, need things, and do things, fast. Park close to the store/office because ain't nobody got time for this; grab something quick to eat while we're out because we have to get the kids to (insert activity); text a co-worker rather than walk down the hall, etc. Additionally, many of us are more geographically distant to each other than we used to be. I walked everywhere as a kid/teen- to school, to hang out with friends, to extracurricular and social activities. My kids require a ride to all of those things. Less meaningful movement, and always functioning 'on the go' typically leads to weight gain over time. I studied nutrition in collage, received the degree (state certification and all) but none of that knowledge stopped me from gaining weight under these conditions. I wasn't practicing what I knew.

    I think it is important to add that when it comes to weight loss, we often want it now! Lose 50 lbs in 2 weeks just by taking these raspberry turd pills. Drop 5 pant sizes by drinking this cup of mud with your meals. When we can't sustain any type of quick fix weight loss, we give up and the cycle begins again. We eventually become complacent.

    TL:DR - We shouldn't have to have special classes for this stuff. We as a society would have less of an obesity problem if we slowed down, moved more meaningfully and mindfully, prepared and ate meals more meaningfully and mindfully, and stopped always trying to accomplish everything the fastest way with the least amount of effort.

  • ninerbuff
    ninerbuff Posts: 48,452 Member
    Think about yourself. How much history and science have you retained? Just cause you're taught, doesn't mean you'll apply. And especially for kids, they don't follow ANY DIET PROGRAM outside of home. It really boils down to HABITUAL BEHAVIOR taught at home.
    Statistics show that fat parents end up usually having fat kids. And vice versa.

    A.C.E. Certified Personal and Group Fitness Trainer
    IDEA Fitness member
    Kickboxing Certified Instructor
    Been in fitness for 30 years and have studied kinesiology and nutrition

    9285851.png
  • ninerbuff
    ninerbuff Posts: 48,452 Member
    I totally agree with you. Unfortunately, modern society doesn't take into account how important nutritional science is. Children and their parents consume GMOs , sugar and gluten every day and do not even realize how they spoil their health. People have completely forgotten about physical exercise because of the coronavirus. I am a member of the Honor Society (https://www.honorsociety.org/legitimacy) and I am very happy that I get exactly the information that will be useful to me in the future.I don't get unnecessary information that I'll forget after a week, I get the knowledge that will help me become better.I really hope that in the near future the education system will reconsider its goals , and that students will start to get more useful knowledge to be more prepared for adult life.
    Source? People spoil their health by over consumption, lack of RDA's, lack of rest, not dealing with stress, properly, etc. Consuming GMO's, sugar and gluten are common amongst Asians. And they have some of the highest lifespans and better health.


    A.C.E. Certified Personal and Group Fitness Trainer
    IDEA Fitness member
    Kickboxing Certified Instructor
    Been in fitness for 30 years and have studied kinesiology and nutrition

    9285851.png
  • Mellouk89
    Mellouk89 Posts: 469 Member
    edited September 2020
    If education was the solution we wouldn't see so many people who have been in the education system for 20 years being overweight and obese. I get tired of people who always point out education. It's 2020, you can educate yourself on the internet, or go to public libraries to borrow books, it's free.
  • Diatonic12
    Diatonic12 Posts: 32,344 Member
    We can have the answers to absolutely everything and still not be able to do anything. I'm talking the big picture as a nation. One out of three are headed for diabetes and all of the rest that will follow that.

    ForestFreek and ninerbuff, yes.

    I'm surrounded by tourists from all over the world. Seeing young kids struggle to walk and breathe at these higher elevations is heartbreaking. We like to entertain ourselves with playfoods. Immediate gratification with food rewards passes the time but results in so many missed opportunities.

    We're making long term decisions with short term thinking using food rewards. Short term choices end in long term consequences. After all of the thrill eating is temporarily done, people try to devise work arounds using some food protocol that only digs them into a much deeper hole with food.

    They start over and over and over again.

    We can remove most of a stomach but it still doesn't fix it. The appetite control center is located in the brain, not the stomach. Until we learn how to fix the brain none of this will stick. We can't remove most of a brain. It's complex and it's serious business.

    It is a weight battle. A war within ourselves. We have to choose to rise to the occasion and fight like hail for our quality of health for the children and ourselves.

  • lynn_glenmont
    lynn_glenmont Posts: 9,950 Member
    lemurcat2 wrote: »
    Theoldguy1 wrote: »
    Theoldguy1 wrote: »
    I definitely agree it should be taught at school, as well as balancing a budget, pros and cons of owning a home vs renting, how to buy and take care of a car. It would be great if these things were taught at home, but they’re not always. There should be a class called “Adulting” and these things should be included.

    I'm actually going as far as to say overhaul the whole system - screw reading pride and prejudice and learning trig (those should be electives), we're going for a group run and then we're going to make steak and eggs and learn how to change a spark plug.

    There's something so incredibly depressing to me about the proposal that we should decide to ditch the entire traditional concept of education and instead just focus on basic skills to maintain life. I don't believe we need schools if all they're going to be offering is instructions on how to cook eggs and execute basic mechanical tasks.

    I don't think @youcantflexcardio was saying ditch the traditional concept of education, just put in a few requirements for life skills.

    If you're making traditional subjects like reading, literature, and math purely elective, that's a major shift in focus from our traditional public school focus of attempting to ensure that students have the same academic foundation.

    Speaking from a US perspective, this has always been the ideal. We haven't always achieved it, but I don't agree that we should give it up to teach egg cookery and go for group runs.

    No not what I propose. I'm saying some exposure to "life skills" in addition to the "traditional" curriculum. Our kid's HS had mandatory personal finance, health, cooking and "shop". Each was a quarter during the freshman year. Over 95% of the students from the school go to college so the life skills classes didn't have a negative impact on their education.

    Jane wasn't responding to some proposal you made, but this:
    I definitely agree it should be taught at school, as well as balancing a budget, pros and cons of owning a home vs renting, how to buy and take care of a car. It would be great if these things were taught at home, but they’re not always. There should be a class called “Adulting” and these things should be included.

    I'm actually going as far as to say overhaul the whole system - screw reading pride and prejudice and learning trig (those should be electives), we're going for a group run and then we're going to make steak and eggs and learn how to change a spark plug.

    Personally, I absolutely would oppose making English classes and trig electives and spending the time one should spend on learning college prep type subjects on life skills, if you had to sacrifice one for the other. But I have no objection to a mandatory life skills type class that lasts a year in 9th grade. My own high school had "personal finance" as a required semester, although you could substitute econ and most college bound kids did (I did, and learned personal finance fine on my own, but I believe there are kids who benefitted from it). We also had a year and a half of required PE (you could pick a different type of sport or exercise per semester, so it really did involve getting exercise) also. The rest of the things you mention were all electives for us (health was mandatory in jr high, but mostly I remember it being about the horrors of drugs, although I expect there was more, including nutrition), but I think cooking and shop (if co-ed rather than one for girls and one for boys, like back in my mom's day) would fit in. Both lend themselves to some academic things, also -- some discussion of the science of cooking could actually help turn some kids on to science.

    Our jr high health course was gender-segregated, taught by PE teachers instead of science dept teachers, and included a super-secret "if-you-tell-anybody-I-told-you-this-I-will-be-fired" informative response to a question about how different contraception methods work.
  • lemurcat2
    lemurcat2 Posts: 7,899 Member
    lemurcat2 wrote: »
    Theoldguy1 wrote: »
    Theoldguy1 wrote: »
    I definitely agree it should be taught at school, as well as balancing a budget, pros and cons of owning a home vs renting, how to buy and take care of a car. It would be great if these things were taught at home, but they’re not always. There should be a class called “Adulting” and these things should be included.

    I'm actually going as far as to say overhaul the whole system - screw reading pride and prejudice and learning trig (those should be electives), we're going for a group run and then we're going to make steak and eggs and learn how to change a spark plug.

    There's something so incredibly depressing to me about the proposal that we should decide to ditch the entire traditional concept of education and instead just focus on basic skills to maintain life. I don't believe we need schools if all they're going to be offering is instructions on how to cook eggs and execute basic mechanical tasks.

    I don't think @youcantflexcardio was saying ditch the traditional concept of education, just put in a few requirements for life skills.

    If you're making traditional subjects like reading, literature, and math purely elective, that's a major shift in focus from our traditional public school focus of attempting to ensure that students have the same academic foundation.

    Speaking from a US perspective, this has always been the ideal. We haven't always achieved it, but I don't agree that we should give it up to teach egg cookery and go for group runs.

    No not what I propose. I'm saying some exposure to "life skills" in addition to the "traditional" curriculum. Our kid's HS had mandatory personal finance, health, cooking and "shop". Each was a quarter during the freshman year. Over 95% of the students from the school go to college so the life skills classes didn't have a negative impact on their education.

    Jane wasn't responding to some proposal you made, but this:
    I definitely agree it should be taught at school, as well as balancing a budget, pros and cons of owning a home vs renting, how to buy and take care of a car. It would be great if these things were taught at home, but they’re not always. There should be a class called “Adulting” and these things should be included.

    I'm actually going as far as to say overhaul the whole system - screw reading pride and prejudice and learning trig (those should be electives), we're going for a group run and then we're going to make steak and eggs and learn how to change a spark plug.

    Personally, I absolutely would oppose making English classes and trig electives and spending the time one should spend on learning college prep type subjects on life skills, if you had to sacrifice one for the other. But I have no objection to a mandatory life skills type class that lasts a year in 9th grade. My own high school had "personal finance" as a required semester, although you could substitute econ and most college bound kids did (I did, and learned personal finance fine on my own, but I believe there are kids who benefitted from it). We also had a year and a half of required PE (you could pick a different type of sport or exercise per semester, so it really did involve getting exercise) also. The rest of the things you mention were all electives for us (health was mandatory in jr high, but mostly I remember it being about the horrors of drugs, although I expect there was more, including nutrition), but I think cooking and shop (if co-ed rather than one for girls and one for boys, like back in my mom's day) would fit in. Both lend themselves to some academic things, also -- some discussion of the science of cooking could actually help turn some kids on to science.

    Our jr high health course was gender-segregated, taught by PE teachers instead of science dept teachers, and included a super-secret "if-you-tell-anybody-I-told-you-this-I-will-be-fired" informative response to a question about how different contraception methods work.

    Our health was co-ed, but we had sex-segregated sessions in elementary school (the girl's was basically an ad for some brand of maxipads, plus about getting one's period), and then later stuff in high school about condoms (since the AIDS epidemic was ongoing by then).
  • lemurcat2
    lemurcat2 Posts: 7,899 Member
    Slacker16 wrote: »
    Well, parents used to have the time. Middle and upper class moms and a lot of working class moms stayed home. Their preschool kids got the important basic civilization from someone who considered it her job to get him ready to go to school. She had time to make meals from scratch, garden, and preserve the food she'd grown. It was possible for a man to support a wife and family on the salary he'd make as a high school graduate. (...)
    Off-topic, but what you're describing was actually very rare in human history.

    Until the mid-20th century, having an able-bodied adult member of the household that didn't contribute to its income was a luxury that only the upper classes, and maybe a part of the middle class, could afford... which wasn't a lot of people. In fact, until the mid-19th century, most families needed older children to contribute as well...

    I had started to type a similar response, but it started getting too long, and then I saw you had made the point much more succinctly. This image of working and middle class families supported by a single male wage earner while the mother stayed home, made dinner (or told the maid what to make for dinner), and worried about whether Beaver was skipping out on cotillion classes was at best a reality for 20 years after WWII, and even then was more of a middle and upper-middle class reality than a working class reality.

    In the 19th century and for much of the 20th century and current 21st century, working class families have needed even younger children to contribute, around the house, if not in the income economy.

    If you lived on a farm, you likely performed meaningful chores that needed to be done, such as feeding animals, cleaning stalls and pens, collecting eggs, or milking. My mother, in the 1930s, did some of those chores before and after school and on weekends. In the 19th century, my grandmother was looking after younger siblings before she was old enough to go to school, which she was only able to do for about three years before needing to drop out and contribute to the running of the farm as an "older child" by the time she was 10. And her parents owned their own farm, so likely would be considered middle class, not working class.

    If you lived in an urban environment and were working class or lower-middle class, you might have been (and still might be) expected to mind younger children, run errands, pick up groceries in your little red wagon and bring them home, help bottle the home-made beer and gin during Prohibition, and earn money for your own needs or even to contribute to household needs doing whatever age-appropriate remunerative work was available (newspaper routes in the old days, mowing lawns in neighborhoods that have lawns, babysitting, pet-sitting or dog-walking, shoveling snow, and fast-food/retail work when you reached the legal age.

    Well, this has started to get long too. :smile:

    Yeah, all this. Both my grandmothers worked (one helped with the family farm and made extra money as a teacher and then a newspaper reporter, the other helped run a family dry goods store while helping out with a homestead plot and acting as the only medical care in the area (she was a Chicago trained nurse who moved to the middle of nowhere with her husband). Going back further, basically all my family were farmers (with loads of kids), so the women were certainly working too. Even when that's not the case -- one gg-grandfather immigranted from England in 1870 or so and became a farmer -- his own mom was a haberdasher and then (with 8 kids) shared in the running of his parents' clothing store. After his family lost their money and the father died, she and a daughter had an embroidery business.