Comments

Episode-2540- 10 Life Skills We Should Teach Every Child — 3 Comments

  1. What I can say about skill sets is that there are a whole group of them that are not even known in most parts of society yet have been found extremely valuable for those who managed to find out about them and learn them.

    These all center around communication and helping people, but include how to study for application, and how to organize and manage groups.

    As far as your list of skills goes, I learned some of these, but almost none of them in school. At my schools (late 1960’s, early 1970’s) we had music, art, and shop as well as ordinary academics. But I imagine that many schools can not “afford” to offer such classes now, if they ever could afford it. If my family had not been upper-middle class and helped me to find summer jobs that gave me some of my own spending money, it would have been difficult or impossible to learn many of the skills I did learn when I was young: woodworking, metalworking, cooking, mapping, electronics design and construction, plant identification, natural dye making, bicycle repair…Much later I learned bookkeeping. Very useful skill. And I have now started to learn how to help people for real. It’s never too late to learn that!

    From my point of view, schools are strange places. I didn’t have any big problems in school, but I had all this extracurricular experience to balance out the BS. And with all that I still didn’t get what we would consider a complete education. From my viewpoint now, I’d say that the big problem in schools and society in general is a low ability to confront, to observe the obvious. This results in an “academic aristocracy” that specializes in making things so complex that the real problems never get confronted. This problem rolls back to a general weakness in knowing how to really help people. If we knew how to do that, maybe we could rehabilitate our academic system which has become little more than a dead weight for the majority of us. And of course there are many traditional institutions in society now suffering from a similar problem and thus letting us down by not really knowing (but unwilling to admit) how to do the job we expect them to do. I’m concerned that we might not have a lot of time left to fix this.

     

  2. I’m a relatively new listener but have known about TSP for a while. I’m glad I was able to have a listen to this episode in particular. This really hit home because I’m a fellow podcaster with an entire show dedicated to promoting preparedness and survival skills to kids. I’ve got to say this show sums it up in a way that calls parents to action and puts them to task.

    “Understanding procedures makes you competent. Understanding theory makes you fearless and valuable.”  – Jack Spirko TSP Ep. 2540

    There are certain things that kids don’t know – and won’t learn – unless you teach them. So put your big boy pants on and teach those little rugrats how to learn, engage, and act.

    Well done, sir. Well done.