Wednesday, January 07, 2009

Do you find high school gave you all the information you need on any particular subject?

Often you hear people saying "Kids Today don't know enough about X. They should teach X in high school!"

But I find myself doubting whether teaching something in high school is really intended to give people all the knowledge they need on any particular topic.

I studied a lot of stuff in high school. I took 12 OACs (only six were required). And I can't think of one single subject where high school gave me all the knowledge I need for life.

And that's perfectly okay.

What high school did do is give me some sense of the scope of knowledge that's out there. Because of high school, I have a general idea of what I do know and what I don't know. Then I can use the internet to fill in the blanks.

From high school, I know that coalition government have happened in the past although they are rare and the Governor General does have that discretion, and that if I remember correctly King-Byng is a key word here. That's fine. A couple of quick googles and I was up on what I need to know.

High school taught me that the derivative of a function is a rate. I could then use that as a basis to find the English terminology to translate the mathematical concepts being expressed in that frustratingly vague French way.

High school gave me an idea of what information can be found on the periodic table, so now I can go to the periodic table when I need that information.

High school gave me an idea of what financial concepts there might be a mathematical formula for, or what sorts of things a computer program could be convinced to do, or what can be reliably calculated using the laws of physics. It gave me the basis to self-teach myself a new musical instrument or a new language. High school didn't teach me enough about the causes of WWI, but it made me aware that I didn't know enough about the causes of WWI so I sought out more information when I wanted it.

So why are people expecting high school to give kids everything they need? Are there people who actually got everything they need out of high school?

4 comments:

laura k said...

"So why are people expecting high school to give kids everything they need?"

Maybe because they've conveniently forgotten what high school is like.

impudent strumpet said...

I know, it's disgusting how many people in our society today don't remember what high school is like! They need to teach that in high school or something!

Partisan Hobo said...

While there wasn't one class that taught me everything I needed to know about everything, there are definitely classes I wish were mandatory. I wish at some point, in high school or even elementary school, there was a civics class - I don't recall ever learning about our political/government system except in Grade 9 history, and that was the past not the present. I really think that should be mandatory. I'm not sure if they still offer typing, but it was mandatory when I was in high school and was an uber waste of time. Now that I work in an office, I really wish schools had taught people how to trouble-shoot their own computer problems instead of focusing on typing really quickly.

To your point, my favourite classes were in the last years of high school when I realized that things I learned in, says, Modern Western Civ could apply to history, english, art, science and so on. The interplay between topics made learning exciting. In hindsight, I also really appreciate the sports and arts opportunities that I didn't realize would fall by the wayside once I became an adult.

impudent strumpet said...

We definitely had civics at some point between Grade 7 and Grade 10. I don't remember when exactly or which course (some teacher might have just stuck it in when there was an election going on IRL) but I definitely had the knowledge long before I reached voting age.

Trouble-shooting would have been a far more useful thing to do in computer classes than programming, because all the programming languages they taught in my high school were obsolete by graduation. It would be a challenge to try to set up a trouble-shooting course, because IRL I learned trouble-shooting as problems happened on our computer at home, so to make a course you'd have to set up real computers with problems for people to fix. And again, most of the trouble-shooting I learned as a kid is inapplicable now with Windows XP and the resources of the internet. The theoretical basis and basic diagnostic approach are still there, but the specific techniques are obsolete. Not saying it's a bad idea, just saying it's difficult to set up and kind of different from what classroom courses normally teach.