life skill list

[flamingsword]

I got up too late today to go to garage sales looking for old button boxes, so instead I'll just rant about something that our education system needs: a class in life skills. There are a lot of policy reasons why it will be hard to do this, and i understand that teachers mostly will not want to give students information that will undermine their own control of a class (and destroy politician's credibility). But reading, writing and arithmetic are not the only skills that young adults in the modern world need. There's too much information to sift through, and too much advertising that warps our culture's perceptions of what is needful that ensure that even people who can read don't and the ones who do don't know what to read that will help them.

how to learn/how to teach
how to apologize and be taken seriously when speaking about emotions
how to systematize information
the concept of due diligence and how to apply it to your life
the concept of confirmation bias and how to look out for it
how to deconstruct propaganda and spot exploitation
how to spot logical fallacies
how the economy works at an individual level
game theory and how to create win/win situations
how to navigate the power structures of organizations and understand their relative responsibilities
how to troubleshoot a PC
how to think through long-term consequences
How to avoid normative thinking (this is going to be a whole other post)

If there were books that snuck these concepts into the literature and could be taught at the high school level, that would solve a lot.

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Comments

[kadairk.livejournal.com]

So write the books. ;)

[flamingsword.livejournal.com]

I can do non-fiction? But I can't wrap my head around character creation in any believable sense, and dialogue comes across forced, and I can't seem to < HREF="https://dgvcfaspring10.wordpress.com/2011/05/13/what-nobody-tells-beginners-ira-glass-on-storytelling/">mind the gap.

[jslorentz.livejournal.com]

At first I thought this was a list of YOUR life skills. But I might like to use this as a checklist for recruiting new facilitators... [hint hint]

[flamingsword.livejournal.com]

I can help facilitate things, but I am a flake sometimes and have a lot of health and brain issues that make me unreliable. I am also unwilling to commit long-term to something that I might suck at. You do know that my process is, like, REALLY SLOW, right? That you and Kare make me look emotionally retarded and possibly like some sort of elephant man? And talking with people *about* the work is one thing, but that *doing* the work on your own mental habits is another, and that you can't actually help with that? I just want to keep your expectations of me as low as mine are on this one.

So how about a trial period? And more information on what exactly it is that I'm supposed to facilitate.

[jslorentz.livejournal.com]

I only just saw this comment.

I would love to sit over coffee if you have a chance this week and maybe go over some of the subject matter for next week's workshop on popularity. If we can find the right opportunity, I'd love to create one small activity for you to facilitate in the course of the workshop; if that's too much too fast, then just come out and contribute and we can check in afterwards.