Now that the kids will soon be back in school, the parents breath a sigh of relief. Not only because now school is doing the child minding again for a large part of the day, but also because now their sons and daughters will get smarter again and learn lots of great stuff. But do they really?
If parents have the time and the energy, I would say that kids can learn a LOT more during the holidays than during the school year. Not more maths or chemistry, but more about life and about other cultures and maybe some hobbies.
In the Feel Good Slot of the Dublin Event Guide on 26 August, I quoted Mitch Joel, who said “I’m not going to let school get in the way of my child’s education.” and he refers to a big big problem. The problem is that the subject in school are very very limited.
There is no classes about Emotional Intelligence, a HUGELY important area if your kids will ever be in management or in a customer facing role or have ANYTHING to do with people that might feel stressed (and which job does not have that?). There are no classes about financial or business affairs. How to save, how to invest, how to start a business, how to market a product or a service or even just how to market yourself. And there are no classes about entrepreneurship, or how to deal with bad experiences or failures (your own or others) or how to stay innovative. OR and EVEN simpler: How to remain curious throughout life.
And the things that school teaches you are taught in a way that never occurs again! You don’t have to sit in a corner or at a table and come up with all great ideas yourself because you learned them by hear in weeks of hard work? No, in life you need to work with other people, you need to get/demand/invite ideas and suggestions and contributions from others and sometimes deal with harsh critique.
Maths and languages and chemistry and biology are definitely needed and probably with the exception of Irish all the current subjects make sense, but then the parent should try to find other teachers/mentors for their children to give them a chance to discover all or at least some of the other non-school-taught subjects.
So, Mitch Joel’s opinion “I’m not going to let school get in the way of my child’s education.” makes sense!
