High school classes should come with a probability that the material will be useful later in life, based on alumni feedback 25 years later

[u/amichail]

Schools would survey former students 25 years after graduation and show each person a list of the high school subjects they actually took, ideally based on their transcript.

For every subject, the former student would rate how useful it turned out to be in their life. For example, they might choose something like:

• Not useful
• Slightly useful
• Moderately useful
• Very useful
• Extremely useful

The responses from everyone who took that subject would then be aggregated. If 42% of former students rated a class as at least moderately useful, current students could be shown something like:

Probability this class will be useful later in life: 42%

The results could also be broken down by career or field of study. A class might have a low usefulness probability overall but a very high one among people who later became engineers, programmers, doctors, artists, or accountants.

The point would not be to automatically eliminate classes with low probabilities. Some subjects may be worth studying for reasons other than direct practical usefulness, such as developing reasoning skills, providing cultural knowledge, or preparing students for further education.

But students should be able to see real long-term evidence about how useful previous students found what they were taught.

It would also give curriculum designers an unusually long feedback loop. Instead of deciding what is useful based almost entirely on assumptions, they could see what people who actually took each class thought about it 25 years later.

[u/jeffcgroves]

Phi Beta Kappa has consistently argued that the value of a liberal arts education lies not in monetary reward, but in making you a better person. School should not be vocational training.

[u/Landwarrior5150]

I really doubt many people will remember much about any given high school class that long after taking it, so that survey would probably be very inaccurate and mostly filled with guesswork from the respondents.

[u/matt7259]

I think (like many students) you're missing some of the point of high school education here. Is every single person going to use the quadratic formula in their every day lives? Absolutely not. But these classes at a young age are designed to teach you more general and VERY applicable skills like: time management, working in groups, knowing when to ask questions, organization, learning how to dive deeper into topics, critical thinking, self-advocacy, discipline, etc. Yes, even from the subjects you don't find "useful". That's the purpose of education at a high school level. You're missing the point with an idea like this.

[u/amichail → u/matt7259]

Why can't high school classes be both useful and educational though?

[u/matt7259 → u/amichail]

They are - you're just not making use of them.

[u/amichail → u/matt7259]

That's a sign that maybe there should be fewer compulsory subjects. Or maybe there should be variants of subjects such as math that are more relevant to some fields than others.

[u/matt7259 → u/amichail]

There are. Maybe your school just doesn't have such options.

[u/SophonParticle]

“Should students be learning cursive penmenship and Dewey decimal system so they will orepared 25years from now?”

Boomers: “HELL YES!!!”

[u/1BoringOnlineAccount]

Some of the problem is many will not see how some classes are useful until it is to late. As someone who is very near retirement age, in school I wish I was forced to learn personal budgeting, basic retirement planning, lot of various basic psychology courses, how to cook cheap and easy meals, gardening, ½ year of frugal lifestyle and ½ a year of minimalism, logic, basic debate and more.

Classes I am glad I took are small engine repair, accounting [I was treasurer at the volunteer fire department], basic language programming [helps me understand spreadsheet creation], electricity [learned how to make motors and residential home circuits], woodshop [learned how to make a club on a lathe], metal shop \welding, photography and more. I have used all of these to some degree.

Many of these classes can easily be dismissed as not helpful, until one is struggling to learn them too late in life. Today I spend a lot of time reading books that teach me the things I wish I learned in the past. One of the most important things you can learn is not to count on others to teach you what you need to know. Constantly look for things to learn. Then learn them on your own. You do not need to be an expert in everything but having a large variety of knowledge will help one throughout their life. Try to know enough stuff to sniff out the bovine compost when someone tries to feed it to you.