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[Darvi]

'round here we compromised on ä too.

[Leafsnail]

The first one seems... odd.  It's quite difficult to identify "common misconceptions"... the ones you talk about seem pretty isolated, and just teaching people against those specific ones seems counterproductive.  In those cases a better knowledge of physics (specifically how gravitational fields work, which you should come to sooner or later) and IT would help more than just informing them about those specific things.

The second one is better but something I'd hope you'd naturally gain as you go through education, rather than having an extra class for (especially since your examples are covered by existing subjects).  Jazz goes under music education, food goes under cooking.  "language beyond slang and everyday language" should be covered by English while "basic physics and essential history and culture" could be serviced by physics and history (with maybe some geography for present day culture.

Leaving aside the sexism apparently inherent in your third section... well, I can see why you'd want to teach some basic skills to people, but the fact of the matter is a lot of people won't ever really need to go out into the wilderness.  Swimming sounds good as MSH said since almost everyone will be near water in their lives, but I feel like teaching kids survival skills like cooking and running a household would be better than wilderness stuff.  There are plenty of extracurricular groups (see: scouts) for doing that kind of thing too.

[alway]

The first one you mentioned is merely throwing trivia at people. Courses in critical thinking would be much more effective at accomplishing its stated goal. Not only does it do that, but it helps in pretty much every other area of learning at the same time. Teaching people about fallacious reasoning, the ineptitudes of their own minds in regards to beliefs, biases, and predispositions, and how to work through those things using reasoning in order to come to a correct solution. Those would be quite helpful for anyone.

[Truean]

.

[Leafsnail]

That's the kind of social situation where you're meant to make sarcastic comments at them until they stop.

[Truean]

That's the kind of social situation where you're meant to make sarcastic comments at them until they stop.

What did you think I do? It doesn't seem to work.

[Vattic]

The first one seems... odd.  It's quite difficult to identify "common misconceptions"... the ones you talk about seem pretty isolated, and just teaching people against those specific ones seems counterproductive.  In those cases a better knowledge of physics (specifically how gravitational fields work, which you should come to sooner or later) and IT would help more than just informing them about those specific things.

Teaching critical thinking would do wonders.

In the UK at least I think it's a shame children aren't taught about how our country is ran and how elections work. The only people who seem to know about it are those from political families and those who took a personal interest. There are many misconceptions about it.

[Leafsnail]

Ah, not sure how I forgot that considering I have a critical thinking qualification >.>.  I guess the issue with teaching it that teachers have is that it could suddenly make teaching kids other stuff a whole lot harder .  It's definitely a useful skill to have though.

I think I got some education on how parliament works in PSHE, but I don't know if everyone gets that.

[Flare]

Wilderness Survival:
So many people barely know how to knap or make a fire, how the hell would this world work without power, google and the internet? Things would go to hell. We need to teach the boys to stop playing Call of Duty and eating chips and learn to make a fire and hunt. We need to teach the teenage girls(that dosent know already) that fashion isnt everything, and a dark age is an age of compromises, those too small jeans can be used for other things than failing at looking pretty, for example, feeding a fire or cutting into useful cloth for example for bandaging a wound. If we stay this way, the next generation will be a bunch of Apple consumer slaves that can barely screw a lightbulb in place!

I don't know about this part of your argument. There seems to be a little bit of bias at work here. These skills are probably not going to be needed by a great deal of people. The conditional that what if all the things we depend upon were to end tomorrow is also a little on the strange side. Why should we accept this anymore than the mandatory education of horror literature given the future condition that cosmic horrors will arrive tomorrow and people with the most love-craftian knowledge and the hardness of mind to brave the dangers will be the ones that prevail?

It seems to me that learning about these things are often not going to pay out in the end, contradicting the potential utilitarian argument why we should learn survivalist knowledge. It seems to me with arguments such as these that the next best option would be to educate people to seek out those that know how to do these things instead of every single individual themselves spending time learning these disciplines for events that may not come to pass.

To be clear, I'm not sure it's all that valuable teaching people obscure facts like what jazz is or intermediate chemistry. There is no question that our species have greatly benefited from the deep curiosity of our surroundings, and the intellectual achievements this has led to, but I think thinking less of someone just because they haven't grasped a piece of information someone else has isn't justified. What matters more I think, is whether they have enough knowledge and enough knowledge about methods of inquiry to more or less make competent choices in their lives. Some examples: I don't think an engineer, even given the importance of that discipline, is justified in making fun of someone just because they don't know how to build a stable building above a certain height, or a trained physicist to make fun of someone because they can't recite the leading theories that guide current subatomic investigations. There are a great deal of things that people don't need to know about to live a meaningful life.

Above all I think, is the theme of teaching people how to educate themselves, or to concede that they do not know the answer when they in fact don't. Far more important than educating people in certain disciplines, I think is to instill into them the logical means to sort which answers are good and which are not. Having the ability to know which arguments are sound and how to plan to acquire knowledge that one needs and doesn't have seems to have far more utilitarian value due to it being guaranteed that these factors will be used at one point or another.

[Frumple]

... jazz is obscure? What? I mean, I don't feel like commenting on the rest of it (agree in places, disagree in others -- there's direct and tangible benefits to learning skillsets and bodies of knowledge you'll never use, ferex), but that line is just... my brain, it hurts. I'm guessing you maybe don't mean that, but... still.

Jazz isn't exactly obscure. Smooth jazz is one of the more prolific modern genres, really. Elevator music if nothing else.

[Svarte Troner]

A part of me dies inside when I hear about people who have absolutely no sense of geography. Living in the United States, I once overheard someone ask where Canada is... Just mentioning that is like someone taking a screwdriver and jamming it a little farther into my ear.

edit: Take for example the whole Sarah Palin farce (Well, she's a complete idiot anyway) with the "I CAN SEEZ TEH RUSHAS FROM MUH HOWSE!"

[Lord Shonus]

A part of me dies inside when I hear about people who have absolutely no sense of geography. Living in the United States, I once overheard someone ask where Canada is... Just mentioning that is like someone taking a screwdriver and jamming it a little farther into my ear.

edit: Take for example the whole Sarah Palin farce (Well, she's a complete idiot anyway) with the "I CAN SEEZ TEH RUSHAS FROM MUH HOWSE!"

That's actually a Tina Fey quote. What Palin said was "You can see Russia from parts of Alaska."

[Svarte Troner]

A part of me dies inside when I hear about people who have absolutely no sense of geography. Living in the United States, I once overheard someone ask where Canada is... Just mentioning that is like someone taking a screwdriver and jamming it a little farther into my ear.

edit: Take for example the whole Sarah Palin farce (Well, she's a complete idiot anyway) with the "I CAN SEEZ TEH RUSHAS FROM MUH HOWSE!"

That's actually a Tina Fey quote. What Palin said was "You can see Russia from parts of Alaska."

Do you really want me to go find you an actual Sarah Palin quote  I think the point has been made.

[thatkid]

A part of me dies inside when I hear about people who have absolutely no sense of geography. Living in the United States, I once overheard someone ask where Canada is... Just mentioning that is like someone taking a screwdriver and jamming it a little farther into my ear.

edit: Take for example the whole Sarah Palin farce (Well, she's a complete idiot anyway) with the "I CAN SEEZ TEH RUSHAS FROM MUH HOWSE!"

That's actually a Tina Fey quote. What Palin said was "You can see Russia from parts of Alaska."

This is actually true though.
It's just not actually Russia, but instead an island under Russian jurisdiction or something silly like that

[mainiac]

Teaching critical thinking would do wonders.

Yes which is why we really would like to teach it.  Unfortunately it's really, really hard to teach.

Educating a person is not equal to turning them into a carbon copy of some great person who has qualities you admire.  And teaching someone something like critical thinking is a slow, laborious process that requires them to buy into the whole thing.  Shoving them into a classroom where they are going to be taught "this is critical thinking" would be do absolutely nothing to "fix" the people who you've decided that you are better then.

If you actually tried teaching or tutoring people who struggle for any amount of time I wouldn't need to tell this to you.  Instead you dump on a system that you obviously don't contribute to at all.

You want to teach critical thinking?  Then show me how the hell you are going to come up with a standardized curriculum to teach spontaneity.  Should make for a funny read.