Editorial Claim: School’s Failure

Schools should make Family and Consumer Science courses, such as home economics, mandatory, as they provide many skills that are necessary for life outside of school and away from parents’ support.

Due to the lack of basic skill classes, many students are not prepared to handle the simple yet imperative facets of life, and they struggle to adapt to living in the ‘real world.’

Factual Claim: According to a survey, over a quarter high school students believe that they will be unprepared for their future finances. They also demonstrated poor financial literacy when questioned about general concepts.

Value Claim: Classes such as home economics provide immense value to students because it prepares students for life without their parents supporting them. Students would learn skills such as managing checking accounts, cooking, and other skills that are incredibly useful.

Factual Claim: The number of students that take Family and Consumer Science courses has been dwindling. In 2012, there were only 3.5 million students enrolled in FCS secondary programs. This was a reduction of 35 percent over the decade prior to the survey.

Causal Claim: “The government’s continued emphasis on career-focused education and its refusal to fund life-preparedness programs has created and exacerbated a very real problem: People don’t have basic skills.” Schools and education metrics have remained eerily focused on only providing specific education. This has led to other life skills being underutilized and forgotten. The education system is focused solely on teaching students how to work, not how to live.

Factual Claim: Findings from the Flat World project discovered that financial literacy was at crisis level. A baseline was set using three criteria to determine if someone was financially literate: his/her understanding of numeracy (things such as interest rate calculations), his/her understanding of inflation, and his/her understanding of risk diversification (such as in an investment portfolio). Using these three tests, it was found that only around 30 percent of people were able to successfully answer questions regarding these three topics. Only 50 percent were able to answer two out of the three.

Policy Claim: Schools should be provided more funding for FCS and financial literacy classes because they are so integral to life once out of school. Lack of funding has led to these classes being taken away, which ultimately hurts entire cities worth of students who will eventually become adults. These adults will not have the skills necessary to live, which should fly in the face of the education system’s goal. However, this problem is almost entirely ignored.