The Schools Oughta Teach That!

There's a reason the far right wants kids to focus on life skills instead of education

Plumbers need to read, too! (Image generated)

People don’t know how to balance their budget or change a tire or do their taxes or prevent pregnancy or cook dinner? The schools oughta teach that!

If the schools keep busy teaching kids basic life skills and, eventually, job training, nobody will notice that no actual education is taking place.

There’s a call for us to emphasize careers in the trades or STEM and to stop teaching liberal arts. The far right scoffs at sociology, philosophy, literature and all the rest. You should get a job as an engineer, and if you can’t do that, you shouldn’t go to college at all. You should be a plumber!

Every non-STEM college major is derided as being useless. Don’t major in English — just read a few books in your spare time if you must. Don’t major in art — buy a set of finger paints instead.

I took a lot of classes that did not directly help me earn money, but that changed my life. One example: A class called History, Arts and Culture changed the way I watch movies, read novels and listen to music. The way I engage with culture is completely different because of that quirky class.

Everything you need to know is on the internet.

But it’s mixed in with so much bullshit. Schools and parents need to teach kids how to evaluate information. What’s true, what’s false, what is crap written by someone wanting to sell you something and what is harmful propaganda?

I can tell. If you’re reading this, you probably can. Most people can’t.

Humanity dreamed about a central repository of information for a long time. Isaac Asimov’s Foundation novels contained a fictional Encyclopedia Galactica, designed to contain all of civilization’s knowledge. As that link points out, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was based on a similar idea.

The internet didn’t exist when Asimov wrote his Foundation novels (which, by the way, you absolutely should read if you haven’t already). So he naturally conceived of a giant set of encyclopedias. In his novels, writing the Encyclopedia Galactica wasn’t the real purpose of the group of scientists and experts who went off to a distant planet to work. They were actually preparing for the collapse of human civilization, which their leader understood was approaching, and wanted to gather all human knowledge so the future civilization wouldn’t be starting from scratch.

Huh. Collapse of civilization, you say? Preparing for a dystopian future? Anything sound relevant to today?

I don’t think Asimov or anyone else understood that once we had a tool to put all of humanity’s knowledge at everyone’s fingertips, it would be so full of porn, cat videos, hate speech and propaganda that most people wouldn’t even bother with the good stuff and would prefer to wallow in the bad.

Facts don’t matter to a lot of people.

It took me a while to realize that access to facts and knowledge doesn’t matter much because most people choose to ignore facts and to continue to believe whatever bullshit they like better.

So if you actually want to know something, it’s already on the internet. If you are of at least average intelligence and choose to think critically, you will be able to tell the solid information from the bullshit propaganda.

And that’s the primary thing I want every school and every parent to teach first: How to think. Everything else is of lesser importance. Once you’ve learned how to think, you can teach yourself the rest if you have to, and you’ll know how to navigate the internet.

Real education is the last thing the far right wants.

Think about it. If schools are kept busy only teaching basic life skills to most kids, we’ll graduate a new crop of gullible consumers each year. They’ll know how to do a lot of specific things, but they won’t know how to think. That’s best, if you’re hoping to continue letting a small number of people control millions of others. (The kids of the elite will always get real educations, naturally.)

Let the masses think they have been educated, and they won’t clamor for real education.

We have two choices: If we teach kids to think and give them a solid foundation, they can figure things out for themselves. If we carefully avoid teaching kids how to think but teach them basic life skills, they’ll be easy fodder for propagandists who will tell them what they should think.

I know how to do so many things that nobody taught me. I didn’t receive an elite education — I always attended public schools and I went off to the cheapest university in my state. But I had the benefit of some very high-quality honors classes that taught me so much about how to think and about how to peer under the world’s facade to peer into the complicated machinery beneath.

I’ve been reading voraciously since I was a kid. There’s a lot of stuff crammed into my prefrontal cortex, and I’ve had plenty of time for disparate facts to rub up against other random bits of knowledge and connect themselves into thoughts that make me go “hmm” a lot.

I didn’t learn to do this by accident. I learned it because here and there, I received just enough of a real education to feel motivated to seek more of it myself.

We owe every kid a real education. I don’t care if that kid grows up to be an engineer, a doctor, an artist, a pilot, a hairdresser, a chef, a plumber or a philosophy professor. We need people to do all those things. And every single one of them needs to know how to think if our society is to thrive.

About Michelle Teheux:

I’m a writer in central Illinois. Find me on Medium, Mastadon, LinkedIn and Twitter.