The more I see, the more I think we need a mandatory „Life School“ curriculum in classes. Financial literacy is just one issue, but all that stuff like media competency, scientific method, cui bono, negotiations, assertiveness, how to deal with bullies, mental health basics, economics 101, mechanics of addiction and manipulation aaaand so on, all explained by first principles, would go such a long way towards a better functioning society.
Then again, that‘s not going to happen as it would eventually destroy whole industries and populist voter bases.
The state is the last institution I trust to design a "life school" curriculum.
Remember, these are the people who require your drivers ed instructor to tell you to go 55 on I95 where the traffic goes 85. They're optimizing for covering their own butts while nominally educating people. They don't really care about truly education people so those people can go do to what will result in the best outcome for them.
They'll do something self serving and asinine like tell students you should make minimum payments on high interest debt rather than ask for a financial hardship extension/reduction for government services/fees/fines (which in many cases are legally required to take that into account).
That's funny, because public school is where I learned the difference between letter of the law and spirit of the law. We even did a "compare and contrast" worksheet with speed limits as one of the examples.
Besides, the alternatives to public education are all worse.
You can hold this opinion without indoctrination. If you believe that inequality in education is wrong you will likely feel this way as creating a private system without inequality seems very unlikely. Not to say that public systems are necessarily equal. Obviously they can fail here too.
Public schooling was created because the government was threatened by catholic parochial education being widely available.
Catholicism has fewer cultural proscriptions than what the predominant waspy culture wanted. For example, Catholic schools in native American reservations didn't seek to undo Indian culture. This state of affairs was not acceptable and there was a chance said children would become catholic.
Thus, the WASPs, unable to organize schooling in their own churches for their children at an affordable price (a problem which still exists today.. catholic schools are empirically cheaper than other christian schools), turned to the government as the only way to combat the papists.
I am not anti public school, but I just take issues with the idea that public schools original purpose was for equality. As Thomas Sowell points out in "education in america", catholic schools do better than public ones for minorities even when accounting for socieconomic factors. This is probably why minorities disproportionately favor vouchers.
Public schools leading to equality is today a 'fact' asserted with little empirical data and any attempt at refutation is met with all kinds of accusations.
Yes. Whether it was the California missions or the Jesuit missions of Canada, by far the missionaries were better than the other European authorities. Perfect? No. Better... Yes
This is a good article detailing the original approach of the church before the authorities started getting involved. It's not what you think it is.
I will read it though I have my doubts regarding the scholastic rigor of a wordpress blog written by what appears to be a catholic apologist (not that that makes them wrong just suspect as is any apologist).
But with all respect, you don't in fact know what I think.
> But with all respect, you don't in fact know what I think.
That's fair. I shouldn't have said that.
Re the blog post... it cites several books and scholarly texts, and mainly chooses which ones to present. Now of course, that's a form of bias, but the books and source materials are explicitly listed and I believe they paint the picture even clearer than the blog post.
There are millions of people who went to charter schools, private schools or were home schooled who would take issue with his last sentence. They got fine educations. I'm a big believer in good parents making up for bad schools but you can't just hand wave away the productivity of all the professionals involved in schooling by saying "their parents cared they would have turned out fine wherever they went" (which is the typical retort).
I'm normally on the "damn gubmint" side of things but in public school we had multiple math teachers who explained why you shouldn't pay minimum payments.
Pretty sure learning about interest was part of the curriculum.
Financial literacy was also taught in school. In fact a lot of "why didn't they teach this school?!?" stuff was taught in school, people just forgot or opted out of that class.
I went to a shitty public school in the middle of nowhere and they taught us to budget, handle bank accounts, etc. We even had fake jobs with fake bills and had to make a household budget. They even offered a class with fake babies that girls had to carry around to teach them parenting skills.
The problem with teaching life skills is that they are not retained if they are not relevant to a person's situation. Kids don't have bills or jobs; money is an abstract concept to them. With this in mind, financial literacy should not be taught in schools, it should be taught to 20-30 year olds who long since left school.
In my (not special) public school in the middle of nowhere, everyone (boys and girls) had to take multiple years of home ec: sewing, paying bills, understanding sexually transmitted diseases, and caring for a (fake) baby you take home.
They were extremely easy classes taught by not-the-best teachers (often gym teachers) but still pretty informative and I did learn how to sew pretty well.
My wife attended well-known private schools in the US and Korea and never learned these skills.
Perhaps that is because those skills are stereotypical or political and not actually all that valuable for success in life. I highly doubt that your wife (or humanity in general) would fail to care for babies were it not for home ec classes. However, some groups may, for better or for worse, have opinions predicting what happens to teen pregnancy rates in the face of such experience.
On the other hand, I had a social studies teacher giving a… finance? (is that a class in high school? I know it wasn't a government course) class in which he explained that credit cards were the best means of paying for something. But he was big on the "why," which, in his class was "float." Cash was the stupidest way to pay for anything because the money was gone immediately. Checks were only slightly less evil. But if you could just pay with a credit card you could float that money out there and spend more than you had. Bonus if you could pay off one credit card with another, but for reasons he did not explain "that only works so far."
The man showed us his wallet full of credit cards, but I think (and hope) that we were all old enough to understand what was going on and simply feel a little bad for him. The moral of the anecdote, though, is that sometimes the code doesn't run the way you planned it to, and good ideas run through the wrong systems result in strange errors.
My father teaches so long as he stubbornly refuses to retire, and as of 5 years ago was still required to teach about floppy disks. He is in a non-tech field. I'm a product of my experiences, but I skeptically and open-mindedly remain on the 'damn gubmint' side for now.
How is the school teaching kids to go the speed limit (instead of 30 miles over it) proof that the government is “bad.” School is supposed to teach kids what they need to know and once they have a basic intuition they can further look into things (like hardship extensions, etc.)
Tbf, I have no idea what the average level of financial literacy is. But I worked in financial services and I can confirm that: having a lot of cash from a job in which you are supposed to have financial literacy (corporate lawyer, accountant, etc.) and/or working in financial services in which you have completed exams on financial literacy...does not mean you have financial literacy/will make reasonable decisions.
It shifts your view of reality significantly when you are in your early 20s, just out of college having to explain basic elements of finance to: a financial adviser managing $100mm of other people's money, a corporate lawyer worth ~$10mm, [insert other horrific situations].
...there is no other way to gain knowledge apart from learning, it is not some innate skill. But that supposes that people designing the course know what they are doing, this is a fairly ambitious assumption given that anyone who has financial competence is, generally, not designing courses for the state govt.
And, ofc, lack of information isn't why people make poor financial choices. One of the flaws of financial regulation (and economics) is assuming that if everyone had perfect information, they would make the same decision. This is equivalent to the guy who has a view on the death penalty and thinks anyone who disagrees with them does so because they don't have the "correct information". The issue isn't information, people know they shouldn't take out the high-interest loan when they have to speak to some sleazy guy in an ill-fitting suit at a strip mall (these heuristics work well). People take out these loans because of poverty and a lack of options (particularly in the US, massive unbanked population, large banks won't deal with poor people, unconscionable level of arbitrary fees that fine poverty). Unless the course teaches people how not to be poor, it is flushing money down the drain.
(A side-note for the target reader: the reason why rich people make bad decisions also isn't bad information...it is usually a combination of greed and studying to get stupid i.e. subjects like economics. Wealthy people only see upside, they will believe utterly ludicrous shit that makes no sense because...hey, they are wealthy, and they got wealthy through those smarts (as an example, every wealthy investor I have ever met has gone through the "goldbug" phase...it is amazing how consistent this is). Again, you can't teach it. Ironically, if you combined the paranoia of a poor person with the risk tolerance of a risk person, you would actually have someone who makes decent decisions...but those two attributes tend not to be found within one individual.)
know someone paying > $4k a year in car insurance because of speeding tickets from areas like that. Going the speed everyone else is going but over the speed limit. Life lesson I got from that was obey the speed limit even if everyone else is speeding.
Or the law was reasonable and people actually hurt society by not following it, so we have to enforce it better.
In the case of speeding it is well known that higher speeds leads to more traffic deaths so we can easily calculate the death toll of people going 85 instead of 55 and implement appropriate measures to reduce that.
Just like prohibition and its sequel, the "War on Drugs," this idea is a dud. When people show you they won't follow your laws, believe them. I mean ostensibly government is "by the consent of the governed," right? Why is your response to "consent denied" to force yourself upon them with renewed vigor?
Just as a counterpoint, drink driving laws were widely disregarded in Australia in the 80's, and only now is it starting to become socially unacceptable.
Just because everyone ignores or despises a law, it doesn't necessarily make it unjust or wrong.
I love that in Australia drink driving is socially rejected. Not 100%, but more so than in any other country I’ve seen.
Even with many young men, you are not cool, not a rebel, not “boys will be boys”, not “just this once”, none of that “I live nearby”. You are a bloody idiot, mate, and a wanker.
I agree with your point in the sense that popularity shouldn't be the overall guide on the law - morality should play a role.
But there is a very practical point that if the "governed" are not listening, than the "governor" had better! Revolutions and civil wars have occurred over such.
Also too often "popular" is conflated with "visible/noisome support". See the gay marriage here in Australia. Lots of noise on both sides, it took a referendum to prove that 61% supported it.
Aside: my experience is it has been socially unacceptable to drink drive for 25+ years for everyone I know. You and I are having different life experiences!
And the same in Oz for littering and mandatory bicycle helmets. People initially disregarded the laws but then the behavior became socially normalized. Nowdays if someone is seen littering they will often be scolded by a random citizen.
Several reports point out that when the 55 speed limit was repealed, traffic deaths increased. Here are a couple of citations:
1) "Rising speed limits over the past 25 years have cost nearly 37,000 lives, including more than 1,900 in 2017 alone, a new study by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety shows ... For the new study, Charles Farmer, IIHS vice president for research and statistical services, analyzed the effect of changes in the maximum posted speed limit in every state from 1993 to 2017. ... Farmer found that a 5 mph increase in the maximum speed limit was associated with an 8 percent increase in the fatality rate on interstates and freeways " - https://www.iihs.org/news/detail/speed-limit-increases-are-t...
> We examined the long-term effects of the 1995 repeal of federal speed limit controls on road fatalities and injuries in fatal crashes. ... We found a 3.2% increase in road fatalities attributable to the raised speed limits on all road types in the United States. The highest increases were on rural interstates (9.1%) and urban interstates (4.0%). We estimated that 12 545 deaths (95% confidence interval [CI] = 8739, 16 352) and 36 583 injuries in fatal crashes (95% CI = 29 322, 43 844) were attributable to increases in speed limits across the United States."
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5005740/ shows "Joinpoint analysis of trends in motor vehicle traffic fatality rates, all ages, by sex, 1968 to 2010" in figure 2 you can see the decrease in fatalities after the law was put into place in 1973, followed by a regression to a decreasing mean.
This is in agreement with Wikipedia's statement "Although the vast majority of states reported fewer traffic deaths in 1974 compared with 1973, there were in fact three states where traffic deaths actually increased ... According to the National Research Council, there was a decrease in fatalities of about 3,000 to 5,000 lives in 1974, and about 2,000 to 4,000 lives saved annually thereafter through 1983".
It therefore doesn't appear that traffic deaths increased with the enactment of the National Maximum Speed Law.
You have to design roads for certain speeds. Higher speed doesn't lead to more accidents, it leads to worse accidents. Road design decides how frequent those accidents are.
People ignore the sign if the sign doesn't match the road design.
One part of that is mismatch between road and speed limit.
Roads designed for 30, 55 and 85 miles are completely different beasts with different lane width, straight segments length, turn radius, traffic calming elements, etc.
Puting an autobahn and plunking a 50 mph limit there is a recipe for all-out "speeding."
California has an obscure law that says something like if 90% of the people are breaking a law (going over a speed) the state needs to up, or lower, the speed limit.
A lawyer got the county to up the speed limit on a boulevard I drive, after he got mad over a ticket.
(I don't know the details. It's something to do with Speed Traps I think? I remember seeing an angry Lawyer, and felt he had a right to be pissed in a local newspaper.)
I agree, though I think the "bad law" is the way the roads are designed, and the city planning which lead to the need for those sorts of roads in the first place.
That is, the contract that needs to be revisited is the contract which says that we prefer private cars over mass transit, walking, and bikes; that we prefer zoning over mixed use; that we prefer sprawl over density; that we design roads the encourage people to speed; that we mandate parking minimums; etc.
While I think you think the contract to revisit in the one which says people are breaking the law by following the speed of traffic instead of the speed limit.
I agree with this, but there is a big BUT. We need some changes in how we think. Specifically we need to recognize specialization. We often give the excuse of "It is their responsibility to understand the terms and services." But it's all lawyer speak and we need to recognize that not everyone is a lawyer. The same goes for finance. Using these excuses just allows for ample abuse.
As an example of this, when I took out student loans they were sold to me as "fixed interest" (literal words used and it was at the typical point where you have the option to pick a fixed interest or variable interest rate). My dad and I had a conversation about fixed vs variable interests and the risks involved. But to our surprise later we found that it was "fixed interest repayment option" and not "fixed interest repayment rate." I wouldn't say my family is financially illiterate, far from it actually. But there's still predatory behavior like this that preys on more "Swiss-cheese knowledge" that a non-expert would have and a lack of understanding all the legalize (and my dad has a JD).
So I do think we should make people more rounded in their knowledge, but we also need to do more and ensure that we curb predatory behavior. The disadvantage of making people more well rounded is that the excuse of "they should have understood" becomes more powerful. But no matter how good you are you're not going to beat a team of lawyers and psychologists that want to implement dark patterns. But then again, I think if people were more educated then this argument would be less contentious and we'd recognize that a single person is always going to be outclassed.
These do not seem sufficient in my opinion. The reliance of history class to teach media competency in modern times for example very much depends on the quality of instruction. For an average teacher the history class would be filled with historical facts without reference to the modern times.
Similarly, science class tends to teach knowledge (including knowledge of the scientific method) but not actually applying the scientific method to any real-life scenarios. Even with science labs, students might use the scientific method during class only, without extending it to decision making in life.
Negotiations and stuff can be learned from group projects? No way. Group projects are primarily cooperative and students share the fruits of their combined labor. How does that relate to life scenarios like, negotiating a lease agreement with a landlord who has very different incentives? Or negotiating a job offer with a prospective employer when there is a clear mismatch in power between the two? It doesn't.
Given we don't even use the scientific method to determine the best subjects to teach, I don't think there will be a push to teach using the scientific method in real life scenarios.
Whatever we decide we want to prepare kids for. Do we want auto-didacts? Do we want them to just be able to do all citizen things like maintain their house/car and do their taxes? Do we want to have the best researchers? Do we want the best athletes? Do we want citizens expert in our own culture/history?
The school system has always seemed aimless to me until you hit university where the goal more clearly is to either make you a great professional or a great researcher.
It’s aimless because we (I’m assuming American) have decided to drop the one thing public schools were actually designed for: creating citizens that share a common national identity based on having learned the same things and values. It’s a tool of nationalism, and when you forget or willfully expunge that half of public schools (the other half being the creation of a populace that is decently educated enough to engage in civic society), shit starts to look pointless.
Edit: As an example of this, most Americans can recite both the pledge of allegiance and a canon of children’s rhymes — yankee doodle, mary had a little lamb, etc. Knowledge of which act as an immediate shibboleth to others that you on some level grew up American.
I had some decent science teachers in high school. I don’t feel like it gave me a real sense of the scientific method and the labs were mostly technique labs rather than discovery or scientific method labs. I think this was driven by curriculum programming rather than laziness on the teachers’ part.
Are you hearing youself? Do you really believe that a class goup project prepares you to negotiate an employment contract or a morthgage? Does a person coming out of scool understand they rights, where to complain if they employer is avuvsing them, can sue a landlord or can read a health insurance contract and understand what it covers?
> media competency, scientific method, cui bono, negotiations, assertiveness, how to deal with bullies, mental health basics, economics 101, mechanics of addiction and manipulation
These are all, in principle, taught at most public schools. The problem is students don't learn them.
The problem is that by the time students start being taught them, they've been exposed to years of media and ad messaging influence which undermine them.
I went to a solid Californian public school. Zero anything on mental health or addiction. Got the negotiation but through extracurriculars; the core programme stayed almost intentionally clear of anything remotely commercial.
I have lived in 3 countries, and have never met anyone who learnt their employment rights, unions, health insurance, or how to draft a contract at school.
We had a class called "Career and Life Management" in High School. It was kind of trivial stupid stuff, but then again, it may have been useful to someone who did not get good information from their parents.
As an older person, the issue i see is most of these aren't really a problem until later in life. E.g. adolescents can eat all kinds of bad food. It will have little real impact until roughly late 30s. Earlier financial literacy will help to a point, but bolsters are needed every decade. Same with family relations. Motivated people like me fine, but many families and people just don't get the right push and it hurts to watch people suffer needlessly.
That’s the problem I have when people argue for the important ace of rigorous high school civics: the useful parts won’t prove to be useful until several years after graduation, so even a motivated student has ample time to forget (and the students know they’ll forget, so there’s even less motivation to learn in the first place)
If you look around you will see more and more far kids these days. It might not kill you to be a fat twelve year old but it can hardly be considered of no real impact.
Yeah im well aware of that. But teenage obesity is not nearly as much of a problem as e.g. adult diabetes (~33%), breast cancer and colorectal cancer. Teens don't watch their peers struggle in and out of the car in the hospital parking lot for surgery. We need followups to adolescent health education in adulthood.
i remember CALM class from my high school, and i remember it being a complete blow-off that was taught by the teacher that obviously got the short end of the stick, and none of the students took it seriously.
i learned a lot more in casual life advice from good teachers than i did from the teacher who was forced to teach a government defined "life advice" course. i wish there was a reliable way to impart that important advice to high-school students, but i don't think a government-enforced cirriculum is the way to do it.
I definitely agree that this kind of curriculum should be widely offered.
I'm much more doubtful about the scope of the positive impact it would have.
I think it's roughly the idea that lack of culture is caused by a distribution problem. I think internet more than showed that improving distribution works only up to a limit.
There is a theory - the paradox of abundance - that paradoxally after you reach this limit you actually decrease access to the ones that need it the most.
I think people forget what high school is like. I had something like what you've described. It was called "Life Skills". Most students treated it like other courses - they didn't care at all and learned almost nothing.
I'm someone who liked school for the most part, and even I treated it as a "just pay attention enough to pass the test" class.
I totally agree. Do people really think a bunch of 16 year olds are going to pay attention to a class where you learn how to do your taxes or learn about the time value of money? The people who need this information the most were also 100% the last people on Earth who'd have paid attention to a class where it was taught, at least at my school. Our focus should be simplifying the way our systems are structured and protecting people from being taken advantage of by corporations who do know what they're doing.
Perhaps kids are bored because scholl is boring. If the school assignment was to find the biggest scam in town and file a lawsuit, way more people would listen.
Part of the problem is also that these courses are devoid of any real informational content. My experience with having been schooled in several countries is that kids -- including 17-year-old highschoolers -- tune in when the substance is there. I can assert with great confidence that the level of content in the average US curriculum is shamefully low. This is true in mathematics, to say nothing of "Life Skills".
While I agree everyone should know those things, everyone also went to math, history, English, and biology yet nobody remembers anything from them either.
None of this content will help if people don't simply learn to appreciate knowledge, and when they do none of the content will matter.
People remember a great deal from English, History, Biology etc. Anything used regularly like say touch typing sticks around. What they forget is generally unimportant details.
So, most Americans will know the difference between a period and an exclamation mark. That Lincoln was president during the civil war even if they can’t the battles. Mice come from mice not grain. Basically the kind of basic facts that seem inherent until you realize you needed to learn them somewhere.
And of course people who went further into Math, History, etc where building from foundations created in those years.
A lot of school knowledge is too abstract and removed from life: biology class taught me about cell structure and DNA, not how to do first aid, or the difference between paracetomol and ibuprophere, it doesnt help me choose a health insurance, etc.
People then those same people who supposedly learnt biology become vaccine sceptics: this 'knowledge' is not knowledge that was every used and proved real to them, its just collection of words they remembered and regorgitated in an exam.
Most of it amounts to moving around for 30 min and you get graded on wether you brought a change of clothes.
Thats not to say PE couldn't be useful. Physical fitness was never my strong suit in highschool and PE did nothing to change that.
After making a good salary in a startup, I worked with a personal trainer and learned about muscle hypertrophy, starting strength and general strategies for conditioning along with diet with particular goals. Maybe if we taught that stuff in PE, it would be worth keeping around.
My PE class was actually contained a fair amount of that, just wildly out of date now. Just burning off energy/stress is probably a good thing for teenagers though ...
I did not attend a high school, because I went to school in Germany. But in Gymnasium, a rough equivalent to the American high school, we had two compulsory foreign languages. The first one was English, the second one was chosen by you. It was a rare exception that we focused on learning vocabulary. In my first ever English lesson, the teacher entered the room and said "Good morning, my name is Mr. Fleischer." in English. We were shocked, since neither of us did understand a single word. For the first month I wasn't even sure he could speak German at all. Until my graduation, everything, even administrative stuff, jokes, or complaints about homework had to be said in English in English class. It was similar in French class. That is far from "just memorizing lists of data that they forget a month later". Perhaps, the quality of teaching should be improved.
Btw, one of my English teachers, taught us also in Chemistry and did that in English for a year. That was 25 years ago.
I did learn to read, write, listen, and speak three foreign languages in high school. Beyond learning vocabulary, there was not much memorizing going on. I still use two of these foreign languages regularly!
I would rather we fix foreign language education rather than just cut it. Besides, why not teach parts of these "life lessons" during foreign language class? Might be interesting to compare home economics in different cultures.
I also took 3 compulsory foreign language classes and retained maybe 30 words after the exams. I hated it and treated it as a memorization problem. It was a complete waste of my time due to a lack of interest. I don't think you could have fixed it for someone like me. The root problem was my disinterest in learning another language which I don't think is going to change with a different pedagogy. I'm just simply not interested in the prospect of learning that content, and trying to get that content into my brain was a matter of great subjective displeasure.
That's why it should be opt-in. The people that are capable of getting value from it (you) join in and the people guaranteed to get no value due to a lack of interest (me) can do something else.
The same thing shouldn't apply to critical/foundational classes like basic math. But foreign languages aren't that.
I'd say it shows the weakness of the teaching system, if you can pass by just memorizing. I guess standardized tests are to be blamed for that. In a decent foreign language class, treating it as a memorization excercize should let you fail. And in my experience it did.
Maybe? Making good, well rounded, happy humans should be the number one goal. Skipping a bit of everything else working towards that goal wouldn't hurt.
There is definitely some fat to trim. For example, I remember spending almost an entire marking period studying the poems from Edgar Allan Poe. Nothing personal against the guy, but it's largely useless knowledge for the majority of people.
I rebelled internally and hated much of my English courses. “There’s no way the author intended all that secondary meaning.” “I read that whole story and didn’t even find out if the Tiger was behind the door?!” “Who cares about the island kid’s glasses?!”
35 years later, the ability to write English has probably had at least the same amount of positive influence over my career as my ability to write C++ or Javascript. I should probably apologize to my high school English teachers.
Definitely cut PE; in most primary schools in the US it's just enforced exercise, and there's really nothing educational about it.
I'm torn on foreign language. I think everyone should be bilingual, at least. But how it's taught in US schools is mostly useless. I took Spanish every year from 7th grade through 12th, but my Spanish even just a few years later was conversationally useless. I think kids should be learning a second language pretty much immediately when they start going to school, and there should be an effort to ensure it gets used outside that language class. (Easy if they only teach a single second language, but harder if students/parents get a choice.)
We did have a home economics class at some point in either middle or high school. I don't remember it very well, but I think that could have been a good place to teach some basic financial literacy. What I do remember was a bunch of sewing projects, and while I do think sewing is an essential life skill (I still on occasion hand-sew things), I don't think learning how to sew a stuffed animal is more important than learning how debt works.
People have been beating this drum for decades. The last time it got big, my state (Illinois) began requiring such a class. It's been required since and people think it doesn't exist. I wonder if such courses have quantum properties of some sort.
The course teaches you things like paying your taxes, writing a check, how to vote, etc.
People still complain it doesn't exist. I still have old classmates that make this same "They didn't teach practical skills in school!" posts. They even took the damn class with me. It's maddening.
I agree. Schools are not teaching actionable kills. Just memorize and regurgitate type stuff. no wonder so many kids find it boring. Little to no applicability to real world or life.
> as it would eventually destroy whole industries and populist voter bases.
That is absolutely correct!
Alas, let's look at the bright side, learning all those topics you mentioned in you "Life School" are only one google search away, free (monetarily); they only require an investment of time.
People learn complex things like playing Fornite and Minecraft or understanding Baseball/Football and other sports the same way.
You don't really need to teach so many things. The only skill one needs to master them all is critical thinking.
To teach critical thinking to the students, you need teachers who are critical thinkers.
It does not matter if you are in USA or Zimbabwe, one thing is common everywhere. Smart people who can think critically are not encouraged or incentivized enough to take up teaching as a profession. As a result we end up with this mess of education systems everywhere. It will probably take some generational changes or visionary political leadership to change this.
It is a fallacy to think it is enough to know how to research stuff. In order to ask helpful questions --- in order to think --- you need facts that you know already. Additionally, you have to train your brain, similar to a muscle in order to use it effectively. E.g. a novice in chess would represent some of the figure on the field in his head at one point in time. Every figure would fill one "slot" of his working memory, whereas a more advanced player might represent certain configurations of figures and their positions in one slot. Even more advanced players might hold trees of possible futures of the current field in one slot. In order to acquire that ability, you have to train your brain and fill it with some knowledge, be it personal experience or theoretical knowledge. Being allowed to Google during a Chess championship won't cut it.
And unless you are reading the original legal texts passed by parliament or filing the lawsuit yourself, someone is 'spoonfeeding' you
Secondly, I can't read a health insurance policy and fully understand all of it's implications, and I doubt you can either unless you have some spesific traiing in the matter
Then again, that‘s not going to happen as it would eventually destroy whole industries and populist voter bases.
I smell a non-profit I should do one day…