Schools shouldn't be treated as these magical places where you're put in at some age and over a decade later you emerge a complete human being. You have parents and you spend more time at home than at school for a reason: you're supposed to learn from your parents.
A school can potentially give you a degree of financial literacy instruction. Your parents should be the ones paying your allowance money and driving you to the bank to get your first checking account. A school can teach you how to cook something. Your parents should be the ones eating your food and helping you cook it better. A school can show you some level of DIY. Your parents should directly benefit from teaching you how to fix the sink when it gets clogged. A school can tell you what kinds of careers exist. Your parents should love you enough to tell you that either your career ambitions or your financial expectations need to change. A school can tell you how to build a resume. Your parents should be the ones driving you to your job interview and to your job until you buy your first car. A school can give you a failing grade when you do poorly on a test. Your parents should be able to make you face the real, in-the-moment consequences of doing something wrong.
Expecting a school, public or private, to teach you everything you need to know is a grave mistake. You need people in your corner who are taking an active part in raising you all the way to adulthood and beyond. If you have kids yourself, that goes for them as well. If you aren't there for your children, to teach them the things that schools don't teach because they can't mass produce the lessons to nearly the same quality that you can give them, they'll blame you and the school for having failed them. And they'd be right to lay the blame at your feet.
And what if one has shitty parents?
And what if one is only able to visit a shitty school?
Your right though, one should have easy access to good education no matter what kind of home they are from.
Public policy can/should fix shitty schools. You 'just' need funding, staffing, and leadership, plus to some extent a willingness to ride roughshod over parents who willingly avoid teaching e.g. science, sex ed.
Public policy can only do so much about shitty parents.
Schools are a societies responsibility though. So I can try to create better schools for all while trying to create better parents... Oh wait I'll taggle that with better social support systems and educations for future parents as well!
Good schools rock!
I think a better question is, for those who have shitty parents, should it be a school's responsibility to fill in the gap, or should there be other social programs made available so that there isn't an undue burden placed on teachers and school administrators?
I mean the reverse also applies. What if one has a shitty school?
In my opinion every school should receive top funding regardless of neighbourhood to make differences negligible.
Dude, in a non-gender-specific way of course, I am fortunate enough to be a homeowner and such a huge percentage of my taxes go towards the schools in my area and they are still very poorly rated.
I don't even have children, and I don't think that that should grant me special exemptions because I want to live in a world with educated people so I pay my taxes to contribute towards that, but I'm literally paying $1,000 a year for the schools in my area to have money and they still suck.
No, it's really not the same thing. You can legislate better schools with a variety of methods, the main point being that you're regulating government jobs(to oversimplify). You're more limited to negative legislation for parents, such as punishing child abuse. I guess you could technically legislate certain mandates for parents to be better parents, but like, good luck passing said legislation. And even if you do(and this is the big boi), how the fuck do you enforce that??? And on top of even that, how can you be sure parents will be qualified/able to teach their kids such a wide variety of skills? You can fire teachers for incompetence and publicly investigate school districts for failing to faithfully implement good practice. And it should also be mentioned that shifting these expectations (especially via legislation) onto parents will disproportionately burden the poor who will be less likely to have the time, skills, or knowledge to teach said things.
In theory, sure.
But in basically any third world country, you'll find all the government schools are awful, and it would be absurd to rely on them to teach you life skills. Parents are about the same though
This is because it's designed to create disparate outcomes; the capitalist class who determines policy want their kids to get a better education than the working class. There's also ideology at play; liberalism demands privatization, even when it makes the system less stable in the long term.
Vietnam consistently scores similarly to the US with a tenth of the budget, Finland does significantly better, with only slightly smaller budget.
This is because those countries designed their school system to educate everyone.
Some people receive a better education being homeschooled than what their local school system could provide. Does that mean we should abandon the school system entirely?
The worst case school is still better at teaching you then the worst case parents. Parents who aren't in a position to teach you anything are also a lot more common than the worst case school.
The point of this post is that if your parents didn't teach you this stuff, among other life skills, they failed you. Not only that, but schools can't always be expected to pick up the slack. Trying to revise schools to teach absolutely everything a parent should would just turn every school into a boarding school.