Looking back a most valuable class I took in high school was World Lit. I never read books assigned to me in other classes but the structure of this class was fantastic. After reading the Iliad together, every other book I read was my choice. We wrote 5 3-page reflections on each of five books, one 10-page reflection and one 20-page report on an author of our choice. I read Camus, Voltaire, Dostoyevsky, Kafka, authors no one would have assigned to me otherwise. I learned I loved reading and literature and became a reader of the classics for the rest of my life. Was this professionally useful? Not really, but it gave me joy and opened my eyes to different philosophies and stories.
Looking back on my life, most useful classes would have been: meal planning, cooking vegetables, economics, political philosophy, accounting, basic computer programming, phys ed, board games. I enjoyed math and took a lot of it but don’t use much beyond algebra now. Geometry is useful though for the logic and proofs and spatial reasoning.
When you think back on your secondary schooling (middle school or high school) what course or lesson seems most valuable to you now, in the sense that it has somehow enriched your life? How has it enriched your life? Do you believe such a course or lesson is sufficiently useful that it should be part of the required school curriculum?
For the record, I agree with Peter: I am 100 percent opposed to coercive education. If I had my way, kids would be introduced to books and places to get books (libraries and bookstores) and left to their own devices. But in the spirit of being a good person and a huge admirer of Peter’s I have given the following answers to his two questions.
History is arguably the most vital foundational subject because it serves as the ultimate laboratory for understanding human behavior, power dynamics, and societal change. History provides the data and context to understand why the present exists.
How History Enriches Life
Decodes Current Events: It reveals the roots of modern conflicts, economic shifts, and political movements.
Cultivates Historical Empathy: Students step outside their own culture to understand the choices of people in different eras.
Exposes Behavioral Patterns: It shows how human nature reacts to crises like pandemics, wars, and technological revolutions.
Sharpens Analytical Skills: Evaluating conflicting primary sources teaches people to identify bias and institutional motives.
Why It Must Remain Required
Prevents Collective Amnesia: Societies that forget past failures, such as the collapse of democracies or the dangers of extremism, are highly prone to repeating them.
Shapes Civic Identity: It teaches citizens the origins of their rights, the cost paid to achieve them, and the fragility of democratic institutions.
Combats Historical Revisionism: A standardized, rigorous history curriculum protects youth from political propaganda and romanticized, inaccurate myths.
Question 2:
When you think back about the years of your secondary schooling, what do wish had been part of the curriculum that was not?
—Economics.
Economics is the ultimate study of choices, scarcity, and human incentives. While history shows what humanity has done, economics explains the hidden forces and trade-offs driving those actions every day.
Here is how an understanding of economics enriches life and why it belongs in the core curriculum.
How Economics Enriches Life
Optimizes Daily Decisions: It introduces concepts like opportunity cost, helping people weigh what they sacrifice with every choice they make.
Demystifies Global Systems: It explains how inflation, interest rates, and supply chains directly impact grocery prices and housing markets.
Decodes Human Incentives: Students learn that people react to incentives, making it easier to predict behavior in business, politics, and relationships.
Builds Financial Resilience: Understanding market cycles helps individuals navigate job markets, investments, and economic downturns without panicking.
Why It Must Be Required
Combats Economic Illiteracy: Many voters support policies without realizing their long-term, unintended secondary consequences.
Reduces Systemic Inequality: Early exposure to economic concepts—like compound interest and debt dynamics—bridges the financial literacy gap for disadvantaged youth.
Drives Better Public Policy: A citizenry trained in cost-benefit analysis can better hold governments accountable for how public funds are spent.
I'm going with the general question posed in your remarks: What courses would be useful/were useful in my opinion (not in a particular order): 1) Reading skills - being able to critically think about logical arguments (Does an author's argument make sense?), 2) Writing skills - being able to craft and properly support a logical argument, 3) Ecology - a general understanding of the interdependence of systems (human, natural, etc.), 4) History of the evolution of human societies (successes and failures), 5) History/Study of world cultures and religions in the interest of understanding (non-confessional approaches), 6) Physical Education and Health (food education) - what are the determinants of health and how do we integrate these into daily practices, 7) Meditation and Mindfulness - non-sectarian practices that elevate mental health, 8) Numeracy Skills - applicable to financial planning and dealing with daily tasks.
I may think this through further, but those were on top of mind. : )
In short, 1) engagement in a program like Squashbusters which highlights character development, academics, healthy and fun physical activity, and public service; 2) practical training in democratic group decision making; and 3) basic training in applied logic and ethical reflection.
I 💕love this question! I have been an avid evangelist of unschooling and a follower of yours for many years. However, and- I know you will agree- just because I don't want my children schooled, doesn't mean I don't want them to be educated. While I believe in learning through play, there was a constant mental battle around what was "enough" to prepare them for that well-lived life (note: I come from Silicon Valley so one side of the mental battle was heavily weighted toward it's-never-enough). Plus I have a neurodivergent kiddo with AuDHD, anxiety and PDA so self-directed learning was more complicated and challenging. There was no clear curriculum for How To Prepare For A Good Life. I couldn't find what I was looking for so I combined my decades of research, lived experience and certifications to create a clear roadmap for me and my kids. I came up with The 9 Skills and am happy to share if it helps anyone else:
The ONLY course I took in high school (public school, upstate New York, class of 1971) that I use every single day was typing. And I am grateful to Mrs. Lawrence for that excellent class.
For 2026 and henceforth, I think an Earth System class is essential knowledge for every student who is planning to live on planet Earth.
As a highly motivated student years ago and a teacher of secondary level history for over a decade before leaving to start a microschool, I find these questions interesting and important.
In my own education, I definitely think that literature was important. I am truthfully not an avid reader of literature but I feel like the exposure to quality stories, how to analyze text, and the critical thinking and communication skills it helped developed have been utilized and further developed throughout my adult and professional life in a way they would. It have been without that foundation in high school.
Related, I feel like oral communication was beneficial for me. It was another class that helped mold my communication skills, but took it one step further and forced me to communicate orally in front of an audience— something I would have never done on my own and that truthfully still makes me nervous. But that foundation was laid in high school and built upon in adulthood.
As for things I think would have been beneficial, math tops the list. Not because I didn’t take math— in fact I took quite a lot of advanced math— but because I realize now what math is important to daily life and am only now learning the “why” behind so much of it. I was very much taught math through memorization and never knew why we do things the way we do. Only through teaching my own kids have I begun to investigate this and understand it for myself. I think that teaching math at its root and for practical use is what I missed and should be a part of every education.
I also echo many of the other comments that social studies are important for understanding contemporary people, societies, and the issues we currently face. These were things I did not fully appreciate until college because my instruction in these areas wasn’t absent in high school, it was poor. This was something I sought to rectify in my own small way through being a history teacher, myself.
A large part of the problem with traditional, compulsory school is not so much with the requirements themselves, but with the way they are actually implemented in the system. What good is studying a topic if it’s only done to check a box and not for actual deep understanding of how it is important and connected to the other things we study?
Not directly related to your prompt, but I also think it’s worth commenting on the way schools stratify students. I was on a “college prep” track and so placed in classes that were “more advanced” to prepare me for college and beyond. I wasn’t disallowed to take CTE classes, but there was a stigma to them, and I got the impression that those were not for me. Consequently, I was dissuaded from taking courses I probably would have actually enjoyed, like Home Economics. Not taking a class in high school did not keep me from eventually learning those skills, but it delayed my exposure to them. I love to cook and bake now, but I could have discovered that love earlier if I wasn’t coached to see those classes as inferior to traditional academics.
My favourite and most useful courses in high school included, instrumental music (trumpet), history and english. My least useful courses were science, math, french (interesting for an official bi-lingual country), physical education (although I loved playing Canadian football). For me, this question also raises the perceived effectiveness of teachers. I did have some inspired math, science and latin (yes, in my day, latin) teachers even though I was functionally incompetent in those subjects. The possible training I wish I had was typing (keyboarding). Perhaps, an interesting additional question relating to high school significance includes the issue of inspirational teachers - not necessarily co-related with favourite subjects for later in life.
Keyboarding class was definitely the most useful class! I took 4 years of French and 2 years of Spanish during high school which was extremely valuable! What i wish we had were actually life skills classes: how to file taxes, pick iut insurance, fill out forms (related to taxes) at your new job.
I was a good student but was ambivalent about school, had a phase of thinking about homeschooling my kids, and now that I have kids, I realized school is a pretty sweet deal, and is remarkably stable in its structure from ancient Rome and ancient india, and a lot of the parts that people hate seem to come from the ideas of the church, which we don't have to subscribe to.
I like that school tunes everyone into the same broad culture. It's not just social culture, it's also roughly the same place on curriculum. Every child in the world seems to know "mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell". We discount how important this is until we meet someone homeschooled inadequate. To understand the importance of vaccines, we need to have a baseline idea of how the immune system works. We don't have different niches where people believe different things on this topic, and that's because of schools.
Not everything taught at school is going to be useful to everyone. You can't make the horse drink the water, after all. But it is taking us all to the water, and we'll drink according to our interests and backgrounds.
And schools these days seem to be responsive to the criticisms of families and children, so there is a lot more play in schools, a lot less direct instruction and a lot more experiential learning. These things are expensive though, just because of the sheer ratios needed to sustain them. So poorer schools get less of all this, less oversight because the parents are all too busy working/surviving, and due to the unfortunate correlation between poverty and ACEs in America, the children also can be more challenging to manage, which leads to a lower quality of teachers and administrators in these schools.
Computer Science classes (and helping others in the lab) were the most valuable.
Those experiences prepared me for the next twenty years in high tech jobs. I pivoted into holistic health more than twenty years ago, but the knowledge & experience from those years still form the “backbone” for my understanding of wellness.
I don't believe any classes should be required, no matter how useful.
I wish classes and labs for growing food (especially learning about the “soil food web”), nutrition and food preparation were available.
I also wish I learned about the relationship between emotional trauma, fear and addiction, as well as an introduction to Internal Family Systems (”parts work” developed by Dr Richard C. Schwartz).
The course that would have helped me the most — a class on comparative religions (including atheism, nondualism etc), especially if it included the concept of a purely loving God, who created safe environments for our development.
The damage of the belief in a wrathful God, as well as Germ Theory, with its assumption that so-called “pathogenic” microbes are dangerous, is hard to overstate.
I was introduced to the concept of a purely loving God, and that all forms of danger on Earth result from nearly 200,000 years of humans believing in an imperfect God back in 2012. The mental belief is clear, but I am still struggling to wrap my heart around it.
Required? Absolutely not. Learning by compulsion is a war crime. The only loving use of force is to restrict violent behavior (always with non-lethal force).
I learned from John Taylor Gatto that our compulsory educational system was designed for empire building, to mold humans into obedient workers, citizens, soldiers & sailors. We imported our school system from Prussia.
I learned at my first semester of my bachelor's degree in psychology at Framingham State University (I graduate next May), that FSU began as the Lexington Normal School in 1839, which was the first “teachers’ college” in the USA…and it was modeled after the Prussian school system, which Horace Mann, 1st Secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education from 1837-1848, viewed first hand in 1843.
Horace Mann was influenced by Calvin Ellis Stowe (husband and literary agent of Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin), who visited Prussia in 1836 and published “Report on Elementary Education in Europe (1837), which Mann reprinted and distributed in Massachusetts.
Lexington and Concord are famous as the first battlegrounds of the Revolutionary War, where the opening violence of April 19, 1775 became immortalized as the “Shot Heard Around the World.”
I find it deeply ironic that Lexington was also the birthplace of Lexington Normal School, the first public teacher’s college in America — one of the institutional seed-sites of the system that would later help train teachers for compulsory schooling across the country.
In one century, Lexington helped symbolize resistance to empire.
In the next, it helped prepare the machinery of empire.
Education can liberate imagination, creativity, and innovation — or it can domesticate children into obedience.
Joseph Chilton Pearce once pointed toward the nonviolent power of imagination:
“…children who have an abundant capacity for creating inner-world images are never violent.”
Critical life skills I wish school actually taught us: money skills (it’s shocking to me the number of adults who are clueless and reckless with their money), cooking & nutrition, taxes, and some type of social skills or kindness. One class I did take in high school that was wildly helpful (and still is to this day) was Keyboarding. Learning how to type without looking.
I agree with you, Corine: financial skills, home skills, what we used to call home economics/homework. Learning how to balance a checkbook, not that people have check books really that much anymore but I took a consumer education course when I was in eighth grade and it helped immensely. I also took a basic accounting class in high school, even though I went on and had to take other advanced math classes and that accounting passwords considered a non-college prep course. It should be considered a basic life course also. Learning how to follow a recipe grocery shop do laundry, those are things that we should be teaching, and they were highly valuable to me when I was in school. I also think some basic things about entering contracts for housing whether that be for a lease or to ultimately purchase a home or to buy a car. I also think it’s really important that we still maintain liberal arts and the exploration of our humanity.
Question 1: As a person that believes that we all experience a very different reality, because of how our brains are wired so differently, I don't believe that there's any topic that will be useful to everyone. There's always going to be someone that will not be able to understand or will never use that topic through life. But as the founder of self-directed alliance you probably already know that.
Question 2: I do believe that we should spend time in school (or some other kind of community) learning about each other and how to understand each other better. Not only each other's history and culture, but the perspective we have about the world. How do we feel and see the world. What do we like and dislike. I feel people are so different from each other and we are taught in school that we are all "humans" and the ones that are different are defective in some way or another.
Also, coming from an over-protective family, I lack many important parts that would help me socially and in life. I think school could be a great mechanism to support that, and could be explored with topics like: introspection (learn about your feelings), connection (learn about other's feelings), confidence (learn what you can and cannot do) and self-esteem (learn what people think and feel about you).
I would like to honor my 3rd grade teacher, Mrs. Speaker. She structured the class in such away that every 4 weeks we had a different focus. We did the 3 R's but she then would have large sections of the class dedicated to (Pioneers were studied and then we did a class play on Johnny Appleseed, Native Americans for Thanksgiving and we celebrated with a pow wow, Christmas was celebrated in the Mexican style with a huge party and hat dance, learning about the local government and businesses in which we drew up a petition that was then submitted, Famous Americans where you dressed up as your pick and presented for two minutes) I still remember all this over 40 years later. She made learning fun, learning is a life long passion, my experience with my few years teaching and with my own children is that all that leeway she (Mrs. Speaker) had has been squeezed out and our children aren't shown the fun of learning.
I would love for them to bring back homework. A little responsibility and follow through training would go a long way.
What had an impact: I had an English teacher in 8th grade who taught us how to diagram sentences. I loved that class—a contrast to my other ELA classes that convinced me I was stupid. I credit that class with sparking my love for writing and laying the foundation for a career that leveraged my writing skills.
What I wish had been taught: conflict resolution, execution function, and emotional resilience. As an adult recently diagnosed with ADHD, these are the things that have historically and to this day been a challenge.
Looking back a most valuable class I took in high school was World Lit. I never read books assigned to me in other classes but the structure of this class was fantastic. After reading the Iliad together, every other book I read was my choice. We wrote 5 3-page reflections on each of five books, one 10-page reflection and one 20-page report on an author of our choice. I read Camus, Voltaire, Dostoyevsky, Kafka, authors no one would have assigned to me otherwise. I learned I loved reading and literature and became a reader of the classics for the rest of my life. Was this professionally useful? Not really, but it gave me joy and opened my eyes to different philosophies and stories.
Looking back on my life, most useful classes would have been: meal planning, cooking vegetables, economics, political philosophy, accounting, basic computer programming, phys ed, board games. I enjoyed math and took a lot of it but don’t use much beyond algebra now. Geometry is useful though for the logic and proofs and spatial reasoning.
Self-management, mindfulness, curiousity, reading and reflection, kindness
Peter Gray’s Thought Experiment on Schooling
By Melgar du Poseidon
Question 1:
When you think back on your secondary schooling (middle school or high school) what course or lesson seems most valuable to you now, in the sense that it has somehow enriched your life? How has it enriched your life? Do you believe such a course or lesson is sufficiently useful that it should be part of the required school curriculum?
For the record, I agree with Peter: I am 100 percent opposed to coercive education. If I had my way, kids would be introduced to books and places to get books (libraries and bookstores) and left to their own devices. But in the spirit of being a good person and a huge admirer of Peter’s I have given the following answers to his two questions.
History is arguably the most vital foundational subject because it serves as the ultimate laboratory for understanding human behavior, power dynamics, and societal change. History provides the data and context to understand why the present exists.
How History Enriches Life
Decodes Current Events: It reveals the roots of modern conflicts, economic shifts, and political movements.
Cultivates Historical Empathy: Students step outside their own culture to understand the choices of people in different eras.
Exposes Behavioral Patterns: It shows how human nature reacts to crises like pandemics, wars, and technological revolutions.
Sharpens Analytical Skills: Evaluating conflicting primary sources teaches people to identify bias and institutional motives.
Why It Must Remain Required
Prevents Collective Amnesia: Societies that forget past failures, such as the collapse of democracies or the dangers of extremism, are highly prone to repeating them.
Shapes Civic Identity: It teaches citizens the origins of their rights, the cost paid to achieve them, and the fragility of democratic institutions.
Combats Historical Revisionism: A standardized, rigorous history curriculum protects youth from political propaganda and romanticized, inaccurate myths.
Question 2:
When you think back about the years of your secondary schooling, what do wish had been part of the curriculum that was not?
—Economics.
Economics is the ultimate study of choices, scarcity, and human incentives. While history shows what humanity has done, economics explains the hidden forces and trade-offs driving those actions every day.
Here is how an understanding of economics enriches life and why it belongs in the core curriculum.
How Economics Enriches Life
Optimizes Daily Decisions: It introduces concepts like opportunity cost, helping people weigh what they sacrifice with every choice they make.
Demystifies Global Systems: It explains how inflation, interest rates, and supply chains directly impact grocery prices and housing markets.
Decodes Human Incentives: Students learn that people react to incentives, making it easier to predict behavior in business, politics, and relationships.
Builds Financial Resilience: Understanding market cycles helps individuals navigate job markets, investments, and economic downturns without panicking.
Why It Must Be Required
Combats Economic Illiteracy: Many voters support policies without realizing their long-term, unintended secondary consequences.
Reduces Systemic Inequality: Early exposure to economic concepts—like compound interest and debt dynamics—bridges the financial literacy gap for disadvantaged youth.
Drives Better Public Policy: A citizenry trained in cost-benefit analysis can better hold governments accountable for how public funds are spent.
I'm going with the general question posed in your remarks: What courses would be useful/were useful in my opinion (not in a particular order): 1) Reading skills - being able to critically think about logical arguments (Does an author's argument make sense?), 2) Writing skills - being able to craft and properly support a logical argument, 3) Ecology - a general understanding of the interdependence of systems (human, natural, etc.), 4) History of the evolution of human societies (successes and failures), 5) History/Study of world cultures and religions in the interest of understanding (non-confessional approaches), 6) Physical Education and Health (food education) - what are the determinants of health and how do we integrate these into daily practices, 7) Meditation and Mindfulness - non-sectarian practices that elevate mental health, 8) Numeracy Skills - applicable to financial planning and dealing with daily tasks.
I may think this through further, but those were on top of mind. : )
In short, 1) engagement in a program like Squashbusters which highlights character development, academics, healthy and fun physical activity, and public service; 2) practical training in democratic group decision making; and 3) basic training in applied logic and ethical reflection.
I 💕love this question! I have been an avid evangelist of unschooling and a follower of yours for many years. However, and- I know you will agree- just because I don't want my children schooled, doesn't mean I don't want them to be educated. While I believe in learning through play, there was a constant mental battle around what was "enough" to prepare them for that well-lived life (note: I come from Silicon Valley so one side of the mental battle was heavily weighted toward it's-never-enough). Plus I have a neurodivergent kiddo with AuDHD, anxiety and PDA so self-directed learning was more complicated and challenging. There was no clear curriculum for How To Prepare For A Good Life. I couldn't find what I was looking for so I combined my decades of research, lived experience and certifications to create a clear roadmap for me and my kids. I came up with The 9 Skills and am happy to share if it helps anyone else:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PaghuOQLdnKfF6nOO6VVZVOL1MgU94RI/view?usp=sharing
I would love to know what you think Peter. 😌
The ONLY course I took in high school (public school, upstate New York, class of 1971) that I use every single day was typing. And I am grateful to Mrs. Lawrence for that excellent class.
For 2026 and henceforth, I think an Earth System class is essential knowledge for every student who is planning to live on planet Earth.
Also came here to mention typing class! Most useful class I ever took!
As a highly motivated student years ago and a teacher of secondary level history for over a decade before leaving to start a microschool, I find these questions interesting and important.
In my own education, I definitely think that literature was important. I am truthfully not an avid reader of literature but I feel like the exposure to quality stories, how to analyze text, and the critical thinking and communication skills it helped developed have been utilized and further developed throughout my adult and professional life in a way they would. It have been without that foundation in high school.
Related, I feel like oral communication was beneficial for me. It was another class that helped mold my communication skills, but took it one step further and forced me to communicate orally in front of an audience— something I would have never done on my own and that truthfully still makes me nervous. But that foundation was laid in high school and built upon in adulthood.
As for things I think would have been beneficial, math tops the list. Not because I didn’t take math— in fact I took quite a lot of advanced math— but because I realize now what math is important to daily life and am only now learning the “why” behind so much of it. I was very much taught math through memorization and never knew why we do things the way we do. Only through teaching my own kids have I begun to investigate this and understand it for myself. I think that teaching math at its root and for practical use is what I missed and should be a part of every education.
I also echo many of the other comments that social studies are important for understanding contemporary people, societies, and the issues we currently face. These were things I did not fully appreciate until college because my instruction in these areas wasn’t absent in high school, it was poor. This was something I sought to rectify in my own small way through being a history teacher, myself.
A large part of the problem with traditional, compulsory school is not so much with the requirements themselves, but with the way they are actually implemented in the system. What good is studying a topic if it’s only done to check a box and not for actual deep understanding of how it is important and connected to the other things we study?
Not directly related to your prompt, but I also think it’s worth commenting on the way schools stratify students. I was on a “college prep” track and so placed in classes that were “more advanced” to prepare me for college and beyond. I wasn’t disallowed to take CTE classes, but there was a stigma to them, and I got the impression that those were not for me. Consequently, I was dissuaded from taking courses I probably would have actually enjoyed, like Home Economics. Not taking a class in high school did not keep me from eventually learning those skills, but it delayed my exposure to them. I love to cook and bake now, but I could have discovered that love earlier if I wasn’t coached to see those classes as inferior to traditional academics.
My favourite and most useful courses in high school included, instrumental music (trumpet), history and english. My least useful courses were science, math, french (interesting for an official bi-lingual country), physical education (although I loved playing Canadian football). For me, this question also raises the perceived effectiveness of teachers. I did have some inspired math, science and latin (yes, in my day, latin) teachers even though I was functionally incompetent in those subjects. The possible training I wish I had was typing (keyboarding). Perhaps, an interesting additional question relating to high school significance includes the issue of inspirational teachers - not necessarily co-related with favourite subjects for later in life.
Keyboarding class was definitely the most useful class! I took 4 years of French and 2 years of Spanish during high school which was extremely valuable! What i wish we had were actually life skills classes: how to file taxes, pick iut insurance, fill out forms (related to taxes) at your new job.
I second keyboarding!
I was a good student but was ambivalent about school, had a phase of thinking about homeschooling my kids, and now that I have kids, I realized school is a pretty sweet deal, and is remarkably stable in its structure from ancient Rome and ancient india, and a lot of the parts that people hate seem to come from the ideas of the church, which we don't have to subscribe to.
I like that school tunes everyone into the same broad culture. It's not just social culture, it's also roughly the same place on curriculum. Every child in the world seems to know "mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell". We discount how important this is until we meet someone homeschooled inadequate. To understand the importance of vaccines, we need to have a baseline idea of how the immune system works. We don't have different niches where people believe different things on this topic, and that's because of schools.
Not everything taught at school is going to be useful to everyone. You can't make the horse drink the water, after all. But it is taking us all to the water, and we'll drink according to our interests and backgrounds.
And schools these days seem to be responsive to the criticisms of families and children, so there is a lot more play in schools, a lot less direct instruction and a lot more experiential learning. These things are expensive though, just because of the sheer ratios needed to sustain them. So poorer schools get less of all this, less oversight because the parents are all too busy working/surviving, and due to the unfortunate correlation between poverty and ACEs in America, the children also can be more challenging to manage, which leads to a lower quality of teachers and administrators in these schools.
Computer Science classes (and helping others in the lab) were the most valuable.
Those experiences prepared me for the next twenty years in high tech jobs. I pivoted into holistic health more than twenty years ago, but the knowledge & experience from those years still form the “backbone” for my understanding of wellness.
I don't believe any classes should be required, no matter how useful.
I wish classes and labs for growing food (especially learning about the “soil food web”), nutrition and food preparation were available.
I also wish I learned about the relationship between emotional trauma, fear and addiction, as well as an introduction to Internal Family Systems (”parts work” developed by Dr Richard C. Schwartz).
The course that would have helped me the most — a class on comparative religions (including atheism, nondualism etc), especially if it included the concept of a purely loving God, who created safe environments for our development.
The damage of the belief in a wrathful God, as well as Germ Theory, with its assumption that so-called “pathogenic” microbes are dangerous, is hard to overstate.
I was introduced to the concept of a purely loving God, and that all forms of danger on Earth result from nearly 200,000 years of humans believing in an imperfect God back in 2012. The mental belief is clear, but I am still struggling to wrap my heart around it.
Required? Absolutely not. Learning by compulsion is a war crime. The only loving use of force is to restrict violent behavior (always with non-lethal force).
I learned from John Taylor Gatto that our compulsory educational system was designed for empire building, to mold humans into obedient workers, citizens, soldiers & sailors. We imported our school system from Prussia.
I learned at my first semester of my bachelor's degree in psychology at Framingham State University (I graduate next May), that FSU began as the Lexington Normal School in 1839, which was the first “teachers’ college” in the USA…and it was modeled after the Prussian school system, which Horace Mann, 1st Secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education from 1837-1848, viewed first hand in 1843.
Horace Mann was influenced by Calvin Ellis Stowe (husband and literary agent of Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin), who visited Prussia in 1836 and published “Report on Elementary Education in Europe (1837), which Mann reprinted and distributed in Massachusetts.
Lexington and Concord are famous as the first battlegrounds of the Revolutionary War, where the opening violence of April 19, 1775 became immortalized as the “Shot Heard Around the World.”
I find it deeply ironic that Lexington was also the birthplace of Lexington Normal School, the first public teacher’s college in America — one of the institutional seed-sites of the system that would later help train teachers for compulsory schooling across the country.
In one century, Lexington helped symbolize resistance to empire.
In the next, it helped prepare the machinery of empire.
Education can liberate imagination, creativity, and innovation — or it can domesticate children into obedience.
Joseph Chilton Pearce once pointed toward the nonviolent power of imagination:
“…children who have an abundant capacity for creating inner-world images are never violent.”
Critical life skills I wish school actually taught us: money skills (it’s shocking to me the number of adults who are clueless and reckless with their money), cooking & nutrition, taxes, and some type of social skills or kindness. One class I did take in high school that was wildly helpful (and still is to this day) was Keyboarding. Learning how to type without looking.
I agree with you, Corine: financial skills, home skills, what we used to call home economics/homework. Learning how to balance a checkbook, not that people have check books really that much anymore but I took a consumer education course when I was in eighth grade and it helped immensely. I also took a basic accounting class in high school, even though I went on and had to take other advanced math classes and that accounting passwords considered a non-college prep course. It should be considered a basic life course also. Learning how to follow a recipe grocery shop do laundry, those are things that we should be teaching, and they were highly valuable to me when I was in school. I also think some basic things about entering contracts for housing whether that be for a lease or to ultimately purchase a home or to buy a car. I also think it’s really important that we still maintain liberal arts and the exploration of our humanity.
Question 1: As a person that believes that we all experience a very different reality, because of how our brains are wired so differently, I don't believe that there's any topic that will be useful to everyone. There's always going to be someone that will not be able to understand or will never use that topic through life. But as the founder of self-directed alliance you probably already know that.
Question 2: I do believe that we should spend time in school (or some other kind of community) learning about each other and how to understand each other better. Not only each other's history and culture, but the perspective we have about the world. How do we feel and see the world. What do we like and dislike. I feel people are so different from each other and we are taught in school that we are all "humans" and the ones that are different are defective in some way or another.
Also, coming from an over-protective family, I lack many important parts that would help me socially and in life. I think school could be a great mechanism to support that, and could be explored with topics like: introspection (learn about your feelings), connection (learn about other's feelings), confidence (learn what you can and cannot do) and self-esteem (learn what people think and feel about you).
I would like to honor my 3rd grade teacher, Mrs. Speaker. She structured the class in such away that every 4 weeks we had a different focus. We did the 3 R's but she then would have large sections of the class dedicated to (Pioneers were studied and then we did a class play on Johnny Appleseed, Native Americans for Thanksgiving and we celebrated with a pow wow, Christmas was celebrated in the Mexican style with a huge party and hat dance, learning about the local government and businesses in which we drew up a petition that was then submitted, Famous Americans where you dressed up as your pick and presented for two minutes) I still remember all this over 40 years later. She made learning fun, learning is a life long passion, my experience with my few years teaching and with my own children is that all that leeway she (Mrs. Speaker) had has been squeezed out and our children aren't shown the fun of learning.
I would love for them to bring back homework. A little responsibility and follow through training would go a long way.
What had an impact: I had an English teacher in 8th grade who taught us how to diagram sentences. I loved that class—a contrast to my other ELA classes that convinced me I was stupid. I credit that class with sparking my love for writing and laying the foundation for a career that leveraged my writing skills.
What I wish had been taught: conflict resolution, execution function, and emotional resilience. As an adult recently diagnosed with ADHD, these are the things that have historically and to this day been a challenge.