Schools, practical vs theoretical?

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This is sort of an argument I'm having, whether or not children and young adults in school should be taught academic theoretical things that would basically make them cultured and smart or practical things that are less intellectual but are essential life skills.

When I was in school, most of the stuff I learned in specific classes like home economics, shop, etc, was pretty pointless. The one exception to pointless classes was when they switched my math classes to accounting and business math or something like that from algebra, those classes we learned to do taxes and budgets stuff. But that was the "dumb" math class, though. This is in itself a debate, mathematics teaching. I feel bad I didn't learn algebra in school, because now working on cars and doing any mechanical things, it's important and I don't like relying on java calculators, but most kids won't use algebra in real life, and we should just teach them to do their taxes, right?

For home economics class in 8th grade, here's what I remember. We made crepes. With whipped cream and strawberries. Yeah, that's pretty sweet, right? Well yeah, except I didn't have a crepe making machine at home. And nobody I know ever eats crepes. So to me, this was pointless to learn. Why not teach us to make a regular breakfast of bacon, eggs, boiled potatoes, etc? How about making burgers or chicken? Or even rice?

Shop class, they saved auto mechanic work for last or a few classes later after the first one. My first high school shop class we spent weeks trying to construct a paper bridge that was supposed to be able to hold a book on top or something to show how you can make load bearing things. Of course this was good to show how to engineer bridges, but this is the first high school shop class. My feeling was the teacher did this just because he felt lazy and didn't wanna deal with the kids who mostly wanted to mess around in class. The next project was a co2 car, which was cool and I managed to make the fastest one in the class, but to me, these kinds of projects are more trying to teach engineering concepts, not doing practical real life things.

In middle school shop class, we made shelves out of wood. I still have my shelf I made up in my room. I like it. Sorta practical. Recently I made shelves again for my kitchen. I just got L brackets and screwed them into scrap wood. My shelf in shop class probably took 10 classes or more to make. My L bracket shelves took like 10 minutes using a regular screwdriver (no power drill.) Most people in real life if they don't want to buy shelves premade, usually do just use L brackets and wood, not staining and making a nice wooden shelf.

Lots of people I meet are amazed and wowed at my ability to do normal life skills, like fix a toilet or sink, do basic car work, and cook reasonably well. To some extent, my dad taught me/put the spirit in me to do those things when I was really young, but I'm mostly self taught.

But, as far as I understand it, more people in the past had more self reliance skills like that. More people did their own car work, cooking, etc. And it wasn't schools that taught it, but simply their parents or grandparents. It was just assumed automatic as a part of growing up that you learned those sort of things. So in context of this, I understand why I was made to learn the "pointless" things I learned in school. In, say, the 60s, most people probably knew how to make a normal breakfast from scratch. And the point of making crepes was basically for fun and to teach you something new and somewhat exotic, and make you cultured? The same way shop class taught you about bridge structural integrity. It would be to bridge a gap from your boring practical oil changes you'd (in the former world) be doing at home and other tasks like that, and impart an academic understanding of engineering.

So my question is, what should schools do now? Should they operate under the assumption that the parents will teach the practical life skill type things when they're mostly not, or should schools take over for the role of the parents and scrap/put on hold the academic learning for teaching basic life skills?

I would say both are important and one needs to be able to utilize both sets of skills, theoretical and practical, in equilibrium, in order to be happy. I agree, it would be very helpful for people to learn how to be more practical. I was shocked when I came to university and saw that people didn't even know how to use a washing machine I suppose the more technological we become as a species, the more reliant we will become on having robots and so forth carrying out our practical tasks for us. I would say they are both relevant. I personally do not like practical things and instead like philosophy. I think when trying to create a better world, it is also important and relevant to have the ability to think logical and rationally about issues such as war, justice and truth and coming to conclusions about what you believe. Practical things like building a shelf I feel would not solve many of the problems in the world that require more conceptual forms of rationality. Plus, the world would be an awfully boring place i feel if things were only practical. But I agree, people should learn more practical skills. I just hold contempt towards people who are very good at practical things because I'm not very good at them

I agree both are needed, but as more and more people are in school to be EMPLOYABLE upon graduation, the focus really needs to shift towards the practical. What good is knowing lots of stuff if you don't know how to apply it in the real world to something useful to employers?

I don't think it's so much robotics or mechanization that causes the problems. It's that the service economy is built upon basically people not knowing how to do things. When we stopped producing goods to export on the same scale we did during, say, pre-1950s, the jobs went from production jobs (factories) to service jobs. The only reason for those is people trade time for money, either because they're too overworked from their jobs, or laziness/convenience. This works well when there's money going around, having a service economy. The problem we're seeing now is there's less money to go around due to the economic crisis (which I think the logical conclusion of why there's no money is that there's no actual things being produced.) Have you noticed cars look quite a bit crappier than they did when you're a kid? Reason is, people have no money to repair them. Whereas before, a thousand dollar auto mechanic bill, with a nice job somewhere, it'd be easy to eat the costs, but with a crappy job with no benefits (say, working at Walmart) $1000 becomes a bigger amount.

Basically, in a production economy, you make things people can't otherwise make at home. Like television sets, cars, computers, etc. With a service economy, though, your job is to now make things or do services for people that they're otherwise able to do, but choose not to for whatever reason. So that turns into TV dinners, restaurants, oil change shops, whatever. The problem I see is a service economy is pretty much like perpetual motion, I don't see how it can keep working if there's no actual production going on to push it.

So in this regard I wonder if there's somewhat of a conspiracy at play to keep students ignorant of practical skills, because then the service economy would collapse if people decided to fix their toilets and cook their food themselves, and you know, didn't buy services?

But in that view, all knowledge for knowledge's sake is worthless just because you cannot apply to the context of work? I find that rather sad that we should only accumulate an understanding and theoretical comprehension of the world so we can get a job in a capitalistic workplace. According to that worldview, I should never read a book if it is not applicable to the marketplace and so forth.

I just think if we are here on this planet we might as well find as much about it as we can, about the mechanisms behind the workings of it. Sorry, I just find your world-view a bit hard to digest. I am studying history, which isn't a particularly practical subject but i have such love for understanding how the world in which we dwell came to be that to say such a subject is worthless because no capital gain can be made from it, I find a bit saddening. You may be right though.

Do we need television sets, cars and computers though? I don't think it is a conspiracy really. The reason at to why people stopped participating in manual labor like they did in the ninteteen fifties was not out of laziness I would say, it was due to the fact that technology progressed to the point at which machines were able to do what human beings were not able to do and thus there was a necessary transition from human labour to that done by machines. I think as we technologically advance to a greater extent, we may reach the point at which all practical activities become devoid of any meaning or purpose.

I can only speak on the public education I received in a poor inner city, I'd say myself and the vast majority of other students would of been better off with a more "practical" schooling that prepared us for jobs. I've become more well rounded on my own accord. I get that a lot of people don't have any natural thirst for knowledge or culture but I feel my education failed on both counts, to prepare me at all for the world and to make more 'well rounded'. I don't think I learned anything worthwhile in high school.

Our country has a serious problem with the way we approach schooling. When I was in school, vocational tech was the school bad kids went to.

We need to create more options for HS students and get rid of this idea that everyone has to go to college right after high school. Open up vocational options and also make the classes open to students.

I'd love to see more practical education offered.

Yes that definately happened but not as a conspiracy. The original marketing campaigns for these machines was that they would remove the drudgery of physical work. And they did. But it turns out that the drudgery wasn't the physicality of the work. The drudgery was the requirement that you had to do it. Most people like to do hands-on work of their own choosing. Technology made it possible for people to pick and choose. People who have not found something hands-on to do often feel unmoored and disconnected from the world. It's an unpleasant feeling. Analyzing why it is an unpleasant feeling has kept sociologists and marketers busy since about the 1950's, when this technology started to become ubiquitous. Marketers discovered that not all the physical work could be stripped out of a procedure or people rebelled against it because it made them feel so disconnected. A textbook example of this (which is in marketing textbooks) is requiring the adition of eggs and milk to mixes even though both could be dehydrated and pre-added.






That would happen except it is observed human nature to restore meaning and purpose to activities after technology has stripped that meaning and purpose out. People can't stand to be that disconnected from the material world. It is psychologically damaging. And so you see DIY all over even though people can outsource. What people actually do even with the technology, even with the service economy, is to choose what they will DIY and what they will outsource. It was not having the choice which was drudgery, not the physicality itself.

Back to the OP's original point: I think a mix of practical skills and academic knowledge is needed. Schools can do this. The OP's home ec and shop classes could have been more pragmatic with just a little tweaking. Math classes could also include the home book keeping skills people need with just a little tweaking too. Although there are only a certain number of school hours available (180 days/year in the U.S.), the choice of what to include could easily have both the pragmatic and academic. A home ec class that teaches how to scramble eggs rather than how to make crepes is a minor tweak indeed.

I'm all for practical ed and emphasis on applied science and life skills, but we need to teach history, lit, and humanities as well. Those impractical subjects, when taught properly, broaden the mind and encourage students to develop analytical skills and think more deeply.

A big problem with American politics today is swallow, black/white thinking. More and more, Americans can no longer grasp the idea that everyone who disagrees with them isn't evil or value compromise and the dialectic process. Those are essential skills in every healthy republic.

Public education should be about producing productive, economically and politically competent citizens.

That is all.

In a paradigm where you must BORROW money to pay for your education, you are correct that education has to be about getting a job.

If you have the wealth to go to school for the sake of going, you can study whatever you want. If you want to read books or learn things ON YOUR OWN TIME, that's fine.

However, schools are expensive and most every student is there on borrowed money they are expected to repay, but most graduate with no real marketable skills. I've even overheard professors lament that the workforce changes in technology faster than schools can train people. The cost to get just software licenses to teach people how to use them is too expensive to pass on to the student, but these are the skills employers want the student to have when they apply for the job.

This is a subject that has been discussed countless times in home education meetings. Factions exist within the home education community that believe school is too academic at the expense of practical and life skills. They seem to be dominated by two types of parents - the first who are not academically educated themselves or failed at school but succeeded in adult life through practical skills. The second being those who are academically educated and excelled in school and university but failed in adult life and conclude that academics isn't everything. The common feeling that runs through this faction is that 90% of secondary school is irrelevent knowledge for the real world and 90% of useful life skills are not taught in schools. Primary school level maths and English are sufficient for everyday life and most careers with anything else that is required learned as and when it is needed.

Most home educated kids in Britain are less academic than schooled kids. At the age of 16 they don't know what many schooled kids know and would score badly in exams, but they make up for this with a different set of knowledge and practical skills. Many of them are in a better place to take up employment than schooled kids are.