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I’ve taught all of my kids to maintain a checkbook, get receipts, understand paying bills and understand income versus expenses. There is also this lost art or

I’ve taught all of my kids to maintain a checkbook, get receipts, understand paying bills and understand income versus expenses. There is also this lost art or changing a tire, oil, checking fluids. Civics wasn’t around when I was in high school but I remember my grandparents and parents had taken something similar.

bobthepanda 7y ago
Personally, I believe the loss of civics, home ecs, and other courses of that nature is primarily because they are not curricula tied to standardized testing. With No Child Left Behind and more rigorous focus on standardized testing for everything from determining school funding to teacher performance, anything that wasn't STEM or reading has kind of got chucked out the window, and civics/home ec is the easiest candidate since it doesn't really pull any emotional strings like, say, cutting music classes. When I was a child in the 2000s we literally had two weeks where the "normal" curricula went to the wayside and we did two weeks of test prep for the city and state exams. Then I show up to college and my roommates getting into the top medical schools need to be told how to fry an egg.
- mrep 7y ago
  Are there no required classes like that in your state? I took a consumer economics class in high school just over a decade ago out of requirement and looking at the current curriculum for my high school still shows an Illinois consumer education requirement which can be satisfied by consumer economics, economics, AP macro, AP micro, Introduction to Family & Consumer Sciences or Introduction to Business.
  - bobthepanda 7y ago
    We had an economics course that was mostly macroeconomics, which under this regulation would technically qualify this requirement, but IMO a class on macroeconomics is about as helpful to learning how to balance your accounts, as watching Iron Chef or Chopped is to learning how to cook meals in a college dorm room.
deleted 7y ago
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bobthepanda 7y ago

Personally, I believe the loss of civics, home ecs, and other courses of that nature is primarily because they are not curricula tied to standardized testing. With No Child Left Behind and more rigorous focus on standardized testing for everything from determining school funding to teacher performance, anything that wasn't STEM or reading has kind of got chucked out the window, and civics/home ec is the easiest candidate since it doesn't really pull any emotional strings like, say, cutting music classes. When I was a child in the 2000s we literally had two weeks where the "normal" curricula went to the wayside and we did two weeks of test prep for the city and state exams. Then I show up to college and my roommates getting into the top medical schools need to be told how to fry an egg.

mrep 7y ago
Are there no required classes like that in your state? I took a consumer economics class in high school just over a decade ago out of requirement and looking at the current curriculum for my high school still shows an Illinois consumer education requirement which can be satisfied by consumer economics, economics, AP macro, AP micro, Introduction to Family & Consumer Sciences or Introduction to Business.
- bobthepanda 7y ago
  We had an economics course that was mostly macroeconomics, which under this regulation would technically qualify this requirement, but IMO a class on macroeconomics is about as helpful to learning how to balance your accounts, as watching Iron Chef or Chopped is to learning how to cook meals in a college dorm room.

deleted 7y ago

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