Foreign languages.

More math, science. Computer science. Literature. Arts. Humanities. Or just free time. Let the kids have more recess. Unorganized socialization would literally be more efficient use of their time.

Nice thing about foreign languages is that it lets you read some important historical documents that you can't read now. Rara, don't you love that?

Remember the origins of cursive was to be able to write faster with quills so you didn't have to lift your pen that much.

You know what's an even faster way to write something down than cursive?

Typing.

Isn't cursive taught in like second grade?

Humanities instead? Maybe anthropology?

Spanish and Religion

With the cost of college so high, high schools needs to focus on teaching a skill as well as college prep. If kids learned about CAD or driving a truck in high school they would have other options besides a $100k college bill.

The current education method with live schools and teachers is archaic.

bingo. even if they never write a line of code in their life, the skills that are learned translate to many things in the real world.

also, i think there's a "hidden variable" involved here, because writing computer code teaches you the very important lesson of admitting "i'm at fault". when the code blows up, or doesn't work right, there is no one to blame but yourself. as someone who deals with 17-23 year olds on a daily basis, blaming themselves is an option that doesn't occur to them very often.

lol at cursive "needing" to be taught. both my wife and i are olds. her cursive writing is indistinguishable from her printing, and mine is completely unreadable. neither one of us are suffering a bit in today's world because of this.

i also think that the arts and some exposure to classic literature is very valuable in k-12 education as well.

^ this.

I saw a cartoon the other day implying olds were going to write in cursive in their nursing home as a form of secret code. Other than that use what a waste of effort.

All these fat ADHD kids need more dodgeball and less Big Computer subsidies.

Computer science is way easier than geometry and other things that are required for pre teen kids. It's just historical accident that it isn't more foundational to education.

It's Upper Volta, dammit!. Don't give me this liberal Burkina-Faso commie ****.

new. ****ing. math.

Nothing rattles jerries quite like teaching new ways of doing arithmetic.

Falcon hitting it on the nose as always.

I swear I just read an article about how we still teach math as it was taught several centuries ago.

We need to update education, but the government doing things and forcing people to learn stuff is bad!

Sounds about right to me

I was about to say that's some crazy willful imagination but then again we've got that guy in this thread

Agreed, especially with the bolded. I'm looking into a free app-based program that's group-sourced and teaches skills/crafts. Seems to be the way of the future.

One big foundational change that does have to happen in education [at all levels] is to realize that memorizing facts has decreased significantly in relative importance on any given subject.

Take Programming for example. 30 years ago it was pretty important for a computer programmer to know a bunch of syntax and algorithms off the top of their head. It was the only way they could get work done on a day-to-day basis with any sort of efficiency. Now, you can look up syntax/algorithms in less than a minute using the internet.

That sounds like another one of those gradeless, structureless, new age feel-gooderies.

I spent a year of my life after Sarbanes-Oxley was implemented (over a decade ago) ridding a medium sized company of all spread sheet solutions that affected the financial statements. Surprised to hear they still exist.
I should clarify, I didn't do any programming. Those that had those skills were making a pretty penny though.

yup. that's definitely true. we have all kinds of knowledge at our fingertips now that we previously had to memorize. hell, you can pull out your phone and settle a bar argument with a simple google search.

as an old school assembly language programmer, the second paragraph couldn't be more true. "coding" today is stupid easy. of course, that raises another issue, that just teaching people how to code really isn't enough. they need to learn the thought process that goes behind developing requirements for code, or at least be familiarized with it. that's where all the "real" thinking takes place.

How did rara manage to **** THIS of all threads up

I've encountered an almost identical problem. A huge part of the problem is that the guys in the IT department of the bureaucracy have virtually no programming experience. They're in their positions because they're good at trouble-shooting problems with the various software packages used in the organization. However, since they're the only IT people around, everyone defers to them on these types of decisions. And when it comes to stuff like what you're talking about, they know practically nothing.

I agree that utility is undervalued (numeracy & statistics is more useful than geometry or calculus) but the point of discussing ethics isn't to make philosophers.

And "computer science" isn't vocational training, although learning to program may be.

Well it's much like with Doctors, while they are in the same field they have specialized in different areas. You kinda expect them to be good at something which literally isn't part of their job. If your company wants programmers then they have to hire programmers.