Isabel Bustos / The Cougar
“I wouldn’t even send my cat to a public school!” she said, slamming her hand on the counter.
I overheard this declared loudly by one of my coworkers. She was ranting about public schools “brainwashing” children, how unsafe their campuses are and how they fail to prepare students for the real world, while a woman nearby intensely agreed. Why are there 20-year-old college students, they asked, studying to be doctors who can’t do their own laundry?
The cynical view that schools exist to squash children’s individuality and pump out workers is an unfortunately common one. Public schools, especially, are criticized for teaching students supposedly useless information instead of practical life skills.
In one survey, the average American felt that they used “just 37 percent of the information they learn in school.” Some of the information that Americans found “most useless” included the Pythagorean theorem, the number pi and social activities like making paper snowflakes. Respondents expressed a desire for more practical instruction, such as how to file taxes or perform car maintenance.
What schools are actually responsible for
While this is a reasonable desire, it ignores the fact that basic life skills are and should be parents’ responsibility to teach at home. It’s unfair to criticize schools for not filling gaps left by parents. If a person reaches adulthood and doesn’t know how to wash dishes, the question should be: What support were they receiving at home over the last 18 years?
In addition, most basic skills are straightforward to learn on one’s own with the proper motivation. When I stayed away from home the first time for a work trip, I had to figure out how to use a dryer because I’d never seen one before; my family dried our clothes on a clothesline.
What did I do? I read the knobs on the machine and figured it out. I learned how to change my car’s oil from a YouTube video. As for the classic example of tax filing, there are free apps like TurboTax that make it very easy. Almost everyone has access to the internet, and the internet has become its own form of public education
But most importantly, basic history, math, writing and literacy skills are real-world skills. Lower-level education is designed to expose children to a broad range of knowledge so that they can discover their strengths and interests and decide which subjects to pursue as adults.
It’s true that not everyone needs to know the Pythagorean theorem, but Jane, who will go on to become an architect, needs to learn it at some point. And before she can discover that she wants to be an architect, she first needs to discover that she enjoys and excels in math.
What students are actually learning
Another skill that people commonly claim school doesn’t teach is media literacy: the ability to recognize how messages are formed and manipulated, and to do the same.
In reality, media literacy is practiced constantly in English class. Analyzing rhetorical strategies and authorial intent in literature builds foundational skills for understanding the world around us.
While a student grumbles about analyzing the use of metaphors in Shakespeare’s “Macbeth,” they are learning to decode manipulative language and see through false advertising.
When a student is forced to write an essay about “Jane Eyre,” they are really practicing writing a persuasive argument and articulating their thoughts into words, which is useful in law, business and everyday conversation.
However, the best thing public schools teach is how to live in a world much bigger than yourself. Almost 49,000 students attend the University of Houston, and counted amongst them are conservatives and drag queens, niqabis and furries, frat bros and gender-neutral bathroom enthusiasts. Going to UH can be challenging, fun, exciting and different, which is a much better preparation for “the real world” than the more insulated environment of a private school.
opinion@thedailycougar.com
