Clearly we've spent so long teaching the kids to memorise the answers to tests, that the kids no longer have the capacity for thought; so the schools and teachers can all look good in the "league tables" and gain accolades for successful regurgitation of irrelevant, commodity information.
It would be easy to say that demise of classes like "Home Economics" and other such practical classes are the reason for kids lacking basic adult skills. I personally think it runs much deeper than that. You see, if you have never cooked before in your life, then certainly, you've watched your parents make dinner at some time? Offered to help out with dinner? Surely at least looked up from your iPhone while you were waiting for your burger at Five Guys and watched them take care of your meal? So this is where the parents are failing, there really are kids that are growing up in middle class neighbourhoods and schools that have no idea what a tomato is (but that's another topic for another time), but I digress. Where the schools are failing is with removing the need for thinking in their day to day school lives. Because even if the parents have done a crappy job raising little Timmy, and let him sit on his playstation 12 hours of each day, the school should have been teaching them to think and act based on researched information that isn't spoon fed to them. If the school has done an awesome job, then by the age of 16 little Timmy should at least have the skills to find a basic cookbook, or find a website, or youtube video on basic cooking techniques with simple recipes. Should be able to pick up a book like Personal Finance for Dummies, or one of the many blogs, on personal finance like those by Dave Ramsey, and be able to extrapolate, ingest and apply that information.
This is where the rubber truly meets the road. No school or parent can possibly know every skill that child will need will when they progress to adulthood, let alone teach them everything they'll need. This is why teaching kids to understand information, assimilate it, and apply it in a real world context is absolutely vital. This is what schools and some parents do not do. This is what needs to change most urgently.
Here's a link to the original article in The Guardian, where I originally saw the story.
The problem isn't that Johnny can't read. The problem isn't even that Johnny can't think. The problem is that Johnny doesn't know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling.
Thomas Sowell
