What was the most useful or important thing you learnt at school? Do you think you'd have been better off home-schooled or going to school later?
Children in England start full-time schooling at aged 4-5
BBC Report. After having seen more of the world 6-7 seems to be the norm - with kindergarten before that with a much more relaxed approach.
It seems to me that this is much more to do with social control (allowing two parents to work) than any benefit to the child - then I got to thinking about "What was the most useful thing I learnt in school?"
It ended up being very easy to answer - I was taught to touch type. For 3 months we had 1 hour a week of typing lessons on an old fashioned typewriter - and now - every single day - I use this skill and it saves me countless hours...
What was the most important thing taught to you at school?
All stories and conflicting opinions welcome!
Reply to this I have to admit to being one of those who didn't actually use my school years to their potential :-)
I knew what I was going to do, and I didn't need school for that - I thought. I stayed there to the negotiated-with-my-parents year, and I was gone. So the posted question wasn't as easy for me to answer. Nope, still can't answer it actually :-)
Had I gone directly to uni that would have been wasted on me too. A number of years later after following my dreamt of career for a number of years, partly through wisdom that only comes with time and partly to do with travel, I decided that I wanted to get a university degree to make it easier to get work visas overseas. If 'school' includes university then definitely I would answer as second (Japanese) and third (Spanish) language skills.
Reply to this In Ireland when I was a school kid there were 2 types of secondary schools. After around 8 years in primary school we were divided into achademic or non achademic and sent to the relevant secondary school. I think this division was much too severe. I was in the achademic heap. We learned barely anything practical. Despite what the teachers thought I could do I dont have the personality type to be an achademic. It would have been better if I also learned practical skills like typing etc as well as the things that they thought us in order to aim us at the univerities.
I think there is more to education than the cirriculum that schools provide. I think if parents can provide an activity or education that will make their child a more rounded person then they should be given the opportunity to do so. Travelling in my opinion is an example of something that makes a child more rounded and I am sure others can come up with other things they could provide their kids with. One of the main reasons I moved to Germany is so that my daughter will have an opportunity to become naturally trilingual. Before she even entered a Kindergarten she could speak 3 languages. What school could better provide that? I dont think school systems are flexible enough here in Germany. For example, if I want to do an activity with my daughter in Asia(or anyplace else in the world) for several months I cannot do so. It would be illegal for me to take her out of school for several months.
Mel
Reply to this Before she even entered a Kindergarten she could speak 3 languages.
Mell; your daughter pretty much had the equivalent of my university degree - at the age of three.......
Reply to this Yeah, I am proud of it. 😊
Thank goodness she can speak these languages because she is so disruptive at school. I wonder if she sits still and listens long enough to learn anything there. 😞
Mel
Reply to this Maybe she's just bored. If she's picked up second and third languages then she's obviously reasonably intelligent.
Kid's lives here in Japan revolve around the school. Including after school activities a ten hour day is not uncommon. When I was at school most kids were out the gate before the bell stopped ringing - almost ;-)
Reply to this In Malaysia, I entered the wrong school. My parents thought it was a good school but it turns out to be the other way round. The most useful thing that I learnt was dismantle the carburettor of my discipline teacher's motorcycle because he locked us in the toilet for 1 hour because we were late. And his bike was there for 3 days. However it doesnt affect my result. : )
Reply to this The bored thing is my guess too Jo.
I wish I could find a way to get the school work into her head without her noticing like what we did with the languages. :D
But I suppose if I do find such a technique the teachers will disagree. I help her with her school work because she refuses to do it for the teachers. They complain about the way I do it because it is too difficult for them to assess her progress if she wont do it the way all the other kids do. But I console myself by telling myself that maybe there are some advantages to having my daughters stroppy personality that we will see when she is an adult. :D But for now the school is sending us the most appalling assessment results for her.
Sometimes she hides and seems to have disappeared off the face of the earth. If I did not know her better that is what I would believe. She is so good at hiding herself. Last week the head teacher called me and the police in a panic. My daughter had disappeared from the school after playtime. Of course I did not panic because I knew she would not have gone far. I went to the school and asked where she was last seen. They said she was in the playground. After playtime the teachers went out with some other kids to look for her and she was nowhere to be seen. I stood still in the playground and listened for the slight tell tale shuffle or laugh that always gives her away. She was wedged into a place under the slide where nobody had looked, despite the playground not being so big and they had searched all over it. They want me to take her to a specialist for disruptive children. 😞
Reply to this I wouldn't take her to a specialist, I'd be taking her to a different school.
Reply to this Schooling and social control are of great benefit for any child. It is, I believe, a misguided idea, usually a misguided or poorly understood left-of-centre idea, to believe this is not so. Of course, terms like, social control and schooling are terms that need to be defined if we are to share our meanings and our ideas on this topic.
Teaching Chinese students for the past seven years has taught me that the Chinese education system often fails its students in terms of social control that is to say, students leave school / college and particularly university with a poor and debilitating concept of ‘social behaviour’, which is reflected in their poor performance in acquiring a worthwhile job especially with a foreign company which so many desire. As teachers I have come to believe that we do have a responsibility to develop a student’s potential to succeed in the outside world in terms of accepted social behaviour, as well as giving them intellectual tools, which they will then use in their life, as they choose.
Notwithstanding, I have noticed that the many intellectual who have called for greater changes or a more progressive education system, in which many experiments have failed, have themselves received a very traditional education.
What did I learn at school? I gained a reasonable mind and the ability to function in society. I learned how to live with people.
Reply to this Here in conservative Bavaria I think if my daughter went to another school it would be no different. There are very rigid ideas here about how children should be and how they should learn.
I would like if there was a flexible system so at least some home schooling is possible so children such as my daugher dont get a negative opinion about education. It would be nice if she could take part in one academic class and some social activities so we could see when she is ready to take part in classes and so she will have a social life and make friends. The way it is I fear she will have a very negative attitute towards education by the time she is ready for a diciplined environment. I dont really believe in home schooling because kids need to have as many opportunities to make friends as possible and learn to work with others to some extent and parents need a break from them for at least some of the time but I think sometimes it can be useful to have the option for kids such as mine. I think she will quieten down in time. I was kinda wild myself when I was a kid so I suppose it is not the end of everything when kids are disruptive. She was quite terrible in the Kindergarten too but it is not the law that they have to go to Kindergarten. When she got too bad I would keep her at home until she said she wanted to go there again. Then I would explain how she has to behave and if she promised to do that I would tell her I will ask the teacher if she can come back. It generally works better when I go with what she desires as much as possibe and then lay down some rules if she is to have it.
Isnt there already a bit too much social control in China Jtayli? I would think a bit less of it would be a good thing in China. Especially since only the top tier of people in China who are in the minority benefit from the level of social control that exists there. Arent social constraints supposed to benefit and protect the majority of people in a country?
Mel
Reply to this Mel
Of course, I don’t know or read that you have been to China and experienced it for yourself, but most of China is made up of peasantry whom for the most part have a fairly unregulated life controlled family planning is an example of this, as controlled family planning is most acute in urbanised areas for obvious reasons. I would say though that social control and political control are two separate things and should not be so easily confused; or at least identified before attempting a combination as indeed, economic and political freedoms are not the same and are often confused together.
On some levels there is alarming little social control in China. Personal behaviour that affects others negatively is seldom controlled: smoking, drinking and driving, spitting, dangerous fireworks irresponsible lit, poorly constructed electrics, general driving conditions to name but a few examples of things that are much more heavily monitored and regulated in the west. However, I believe, families act as the biggest social control mechanism in China, which is not necessarily always a bad thing: security is traded for individualism and self-reliance. What is interesting though, is that whether it is labelled a socialist, communist or capitalist country there is always a minority at the top who benefit from the status quo.
If anything, western influences with its notions of individualism and ideas of the ‘self’ are more of a threat to China than is currently realised in my opinion. China needs to retain its vehicles of social control not forsake them. Mr Hu is correct to monitor and seek to control and ease in gentle any influences that will lead to a destabilising affect on China’s social fabric. To seek to change China into a mirror of the west would be sheer folly.
Reply to this I have learned a great deal in school, and am still in school right now, but I feel that you can only learn so much from a book or a lecture. I learned far more about life and history (from a native persons perspective vs. in my case american writers writing histories of other cultures) traveling and just speaking with people along the way.
Reply to this one thing i learnt from school is that excellent achievement during school time doesnt equal to being successful in working life later. no doubt u may learn alot, things tat u could still be using today. Recently i met many ex-schoolmates (10 years after leaving the school bench). Some of those that used to sleep in class while lessons were going on; or flunked many subjects... are earning big bucks nowadays and doing well in their field (i mean in a legal way of course).
i do agree with nomadicat, visiting or mingling with ppl frm other cultures/countries is a good way to learn about what's happening around the world.
Reply to this I hate to sound mundane, but the most important skills I learnt at school were the three R's -
Reading,
Riting and
Rithmatica.
Reply to this Thank you Deronda!! I was wondering why no-one had mentioned that yet! Seriously, without being able to read and write and understand basic maths how far would we all have got in life? Can you imagine travelling anywhere not being able to read signposts, maps, guide books, written instructions, menus, timetables, price lists, phrasebooks, etc.? How about converting currencies in your head and bartering for fair prices?
I would say formal education is invaluable for giving you a head start. After that, I reckon it's whatever you learn as you go. I think the phrase 'a man (or woman!) learns what he needs to know' is accurate. You learn about the place you are in, the people you need to work or socialise with, the customs you need to understand, the history that is relevant, the politics that affect you, the language you need to use and the skills you need to get through the day!
Reply to this The three R's are obviously very important - I think also a fair assumption is that even the most terrible of terrible schools would be able to teach those skills to 99% of children... did you learn anything out of the ordinary at the schools you went to?
Reply to this
There are certain kids who are very academically minded(the ones who eventually become doctors, pilots, engineers....) and I think a lot of structured schooling is good for them. Ideally for kids who are not like this school could be adjusted to accomodate their social and learning needs. Unfortunately most schools dont have the staff or the skills to provide for the needs of many different types of kids. How many of us have any training on how to handle conflict, how to adjust to adversity, how to parent, how to do basic first aid............... These are just a few of the skills that schools give no or minimal training in even though many of us need to use them regularly in our lives and our jobs. How much time is wasted in schools trying to push kids in a direction they are not ready for or does not suit them.
Mel
Reply to this 
