Some of this may have changed, but relative to when I went to school in the US?
Primary education
I’d remove cursive if it’s still being taught. I’ve read some articles saying that it still was in Canada, don’t know about the US. It has very limited uses – it’s optimized for being faster for writing a lot of text than printing, but if I’m going to be doing a lot of text, I’m going to be typing, not writing it longhand.
California and New Hampshire became the most recent states to pass legislation making cursive handwriting instruction mandatory. At least 25 other states require a similar form of instruction in schools, and another five states have legislation pending, according to data tracked by the American Handwriting Analysis Foundation.
Sounds like it’s still in the curriculum.
On that note, typing. We did have minimal typing, but that is important, and I was still hunting-and-pecking until sometime in secondary education when I forced myself to switch over to touch typing.
I’d kill arts and crafts. Very few of the things that I actually did were things that were likely to be practical to build on. I’m dubious as to traditional media graphics being a core part of any curriculum – later in life, someone is a lot more likely to be professionally doing graphic arts on a computer.
Start math earlier. I was in two different school systems, and one pushed math harder and earlier. The kids there did much better on mathematics topics.
I have no idea what the state of computer application education is today, and I assume that it’s changed. Back when I was in primary school, there were too few computers available to teach the stuff, and we had very brief coverage in secondary education. I would hope that at this point, kids in primary education get some kind of coverage of text editing – I don’t know about word processing, which was kind of tied to paper documents, which are certainly less common these days – spreadsheets (or some kind of functionally-equivalent system), graphic design software, web browser use, and email. I’d assume that many people will learn this at home, but you’d be kind of disadvantaged in a number of fields if you don’t pick it up.
Secondary education
More statistics. I saw one half-class as an elective at my school. This has been maybe one of the major things that I regret not having spent time picking up earlier and more of, and I’m pretty sure that a number of people don’t get basic statistics, based on the number of times I’ve seen arguments where people don’t believe polls because nobody’s ever introduced them to sampling.
Less calculus. The concepts are important; doing manual integration of symbolic equations is not, and that’s what I spent a lot of time in calculus on. When I went through, calculus was kind of the standard “mainline” math class if one wanted to take more math. I think in total I took three or four calculus classes in secondary and tertiary education, which is just excessive for nearly all fields, and a lot of what I was doing was not a great use of time in terms of even learning calculus. I remember that being absolutely driven home when I stopped by the office of the husband of the of one of my calculus professors once with a question about a project I was doing – he was also a mathematics professor – and watched him pull out Mathematica to do a simple integration. I asked him about it – I mean, the guy was married to a calculus professor, had a PhD in math – and he said “nobody has time to waste doing manual integration”. I can run the open-source Maxima package on my phone and desktop today, and it can do symbolic integration. There is no reason to have blown all the time I did manually doing calculus problems.
Sorry, bit of a pet peeve.
Personal finance should be included.
I did not like the history curriculum in my secondary education at all. It was overwhelmingly rote memorization. The textbook was pretty decent – though we only covered a fraction of it, but I read through the rest and liked it. It wasn’t until I got to tertiary education that I had what I’d call a good history class – there was little memorization, and one mostly read content, discussed it, and wrote papers on it. Granted, that takes longer to grade, but there has to be some kind of way to improve on memorization. Today, I really enjoy a lot of history.
My home economics class was, as I recall, mostly cooking, sewing, and arts and crafts. The cooking was useful, the clothing repair was minimally useful, and the arts and crafts were a waste of time.
I don’t know how to fix it, but I think that literature was horrible. I read some of the books that were covered in literature classes prior to those classes and enjoyed them. Reading the same books later for school was a miserable experience.
I took a speech class that had a segment on propaganda techniques, to try to make people aware of them in their environment. I think was a good idea. I would guess that this isn’t widely available.
I’d like to see at least some form of basic economics at the secondary level. When I went through, economics was something that one only saw during tertiary education, not secondary.
I personally felt a bit overwhelmed when I hit formal proofs in tertiary education, as I hadn’t had much coverage in secondary education – IIRC, that was basically a portion of eighth-grade geometry. A friend had gone to a high school that provided much better coverage. Not all fields of study are going to require it, but I wish that I’d had more coverage in secondary education.
My secondary education did not offer coverage in some of the physics material, like electromagnetism, that I know that some schools do, which I regretted not having available.
In general, I feel like I learned more in tertiary education than I did in secondary education per hour spent. On the other hand, I think that some of that was because the tertiary education curriculum was more self-driven and harder to grade. If you want to do that, that is going to add cost. Looking back, I kind of wish that my secondary education was generally closer to tertiary – more self-driven projects and such.
Tertiary education
My guess is that this differs a lot from person to person. I think that it’s harder to make recommendations that would apply to many people. I also think that in general, my tertiary education made better use of time than my primary or secondary education did – less that I’d change.
To fill an apparently-unrelated prerequisite, I took a class that covered some law, though I didn’t formally study law, and found that I picked up a lot of stuff that helped me understand what was going on later in life. I think that a lot of people would benefit from a low-level law course or two. It is not something that I would have planned for myself, but if I could go back in time, I think I would have told young me to go for it.
I’d also add that the criminal law textbook we used was one of my favorite textbooks – it was dense from an information standpoint, and easy to understand.
Overall
I have found that the wiki-style hypertext format plus having a browser with search engine available to work very well for learning material. I much prefer it to doing a linear run through a textbook. I think that it’s far preferable to listening to lectures, which run at real time (so you can’t easily slow if something’s confusing, and can’t zip through things that you already understand). I wish that tons of material had been available in that format when I was a kid, and think that more emphasis should be given it in education, if that isn’t already the case today.
Generally-speaking, I think that listening to lectures, especially in tertiary education, was a waste of time. I can get the same material more-quickly reading on my own than listening to someone do an ad-hoc presentation. Just assign the reading and have some kind of forum for taking questions.
Some of this may have changed, but relative to when I went to school in the US?
Primary education
I’d remove cursive if it’s still being taught. I’ve read some articles saying that it still was in Canada, don’t know about the US. It has very limited uses – it’s optimized for being faster for writing a lot of text than printing, but if I’m going to be doing a lot of text, I’m going to be typing, not writing it longhand.
kagis
https://www.livenowfox.com/news/us-states-require-cursive-handwriting-students
Sounds like it’s still in the curriculum.
On that note, typing. We did have minimal typing, but that is important, and I was still hunting-and-pecking until sometime in secondary education when I forced myself to switch over to touch typing.
I’d kill arts and crafts. Very few of the things that I actually did were things that were likely to be practical to build on. I’m dubious as to traditional media graphics being a core part of any curriculum – later in life, someone is a lot more likely to be professionally doing graphic arts on a computer.
Start math earlier. I was in two different school systems, and one pushed math harder and earlier. The kids there did much better on mathematics topics.
I have no idea what the state of computer application education is today, and I assume that it’s changed. Back when I was in primary school, there were too few computers available to teach the stuff, and we had very brief coverage in secondary education. I would hope that at this point, kids in primary education get some kind of coverage of text editing – I don’t know about word processing, which was kind of tied to paper documents, which are certainly less common these days – spreadsheets (or some kind of functionally-equivalent system), graphic design software, web browser use, and email. I’d assume that many people will learn this at home, but you’d be kind of disadvantaged in a number of fields if you don’t pick it up.
Secondary education
More statistics. I saw one half-class as an elective at my school. This has been maybe one of the major things that I regret not having spent time picking up earlier and more of, and I’m pretty sure that a number of people don’t get basic statistics, based on the number of times I’ve seen arguments where people don’t believe polls because nobody’s ever introduced them to sampling.
Less calculus. The concepts are important; doing manual integration of symbolic equations is not, and that’s what I spent a lot of time in calculus on. When I went through, calculus was kind of the standard “mainline” math class if one wanted to take more math. I think in total I took three or four calculus classes in secondary and tertiary education, which is just excessive for nearly all fields, and a lot of what I was doing was not a great use of time in terms of even learning calculus. I remember that being absolutely driven home when I stopped by the office of the husband of the of one of my calculus professors once with a question about a project I was doing – he was also a mathematics professor – and watched him pull out Mathematica to do a simple integration. I asked him about it – I mean, the guy was married to a calculus professor, had a PhD in math – and he said “nobody has time to waste doing manual integration”. I can run the open-source Maxima package on my phone and desktop today, and it can do symbolic integration. There is no reason to have blown all the time I did manually doing calculus problems.
Sorry, bit of a pet peeve.
Personal finance should be included.
I did not like the history curriculum in my secondary education at all. It was overwhelmingly rote memorization. The textbook was pretty decent – though we only covered a fraction of it, but I read through the rest and liked it. It wasn’t until I got to tertiary education that I had what I’d call a good history class – there was little memorization, and one mostly read content, discussed it, and wrote papers on it. Granted, that takes longer to grade, but there has to be some kind of way to improve on memorization. Today, I really enjoy a lot of history.
My home economics class was, as I recall, mostly cooking, sewing, and arts and crafts. The cooking was useful, the clothing repair was minimally useful, and the arts and crafts were a waste of time.
I don’t know how to fix it, but I think that literature was horrible. I read some of the books that were covered in literature classes prior to those classes and enjoyed them. Reading the same books later for school was a miserable experience.
I took a speech class that had a segment on propaganda techniques, to try to make people aware of them in their environment. I think was a good idea. I would guess that this isn’t widely available.
I’d like to see at least some form of basic economics at the secondary level. When I went through, economics was something that one only saw during tertiary education, not secondary.
I personally felt a bit overwhelmed when I hit formal proofs in tertiary education, as I hadn’t had much coverage in secondary education – IIRC, that was basically a portion of eighth-grade geometry. A friend had gone to a high school that provided much better coverage. Not all fields of study are going to require it, but I wish that I’d had more coverage in secondary education.
My secondary education did not offer coverage in some of the physics material, like electromagnetism, that I know that some schools do, which I regretted not having available.
In general, I feel like I learned more in tertiary education than I did in secondary education per hour spent. On the other hand, I think that some of that was because the tertiary education curriculum was more self-driven and harder to grade. If you want to do that, that is going to add cost. Looking back, I kind of wish that my secondary education was generally closer to tertiary – more self-driven projects and such.
Tertiary education
My guess is that this differs a lot from person to person. I think that it’s harder to make recommendations that would apply to many people. I also think that in general, my tertiary education made better use of time than my primary or secondary education did – less that I’d change.
To fill an apparently-unrelated prerequisite, I took a class that covered some law, though I didn’t formally study law, and found that I picked up a lot of stuff that helped me understand what was going on later in life. I think that a lot of people would benefit from a low-level law course or two. It is not something that I would have planned for myself, but if I could go back in time, I think I would have told young me to go for it.
I’d also add that the criminal law textbook we used was one of my favorite textbooks – it was dense from an information standpoint, and easy to understand.
Overall
I have found that the wiki-style hypertext format plus having a browser with search engine available to work very well for learning material. I much prefer it to doing a linear run through a textbook. I think that it’s far preferable to listening to lectures, which run at real time (so you can’t easily slow if something’s confusing, and can’t zip through things that you already understand). I wish that tons of material had been available in that format when I was a kid, and think that more emphasis should be given it in education, if that isn’t already the case today.
Generally-speaking, I think that listening to lectures, especially in tertiary education, was a waste of time. I can get the same material more-quickly reading on my own than listening to someone do an ad-hoc presentation. Just assign the reading and have some kind of forum for taking questions.