I’ve seen a lot about transferable skills recently for reasons. I wonder why we still teach so many subjects that aren’t really relevant in the modern day regardless. Since a lot of the skills we’re trying to impart are irrelevant of the actual subject being chosen, why study English and not law? Why study biology and not first aid? Why study geography and not economics? History vs politics, physics vs engineering, etc etc etc
These suggested replacements are mostly applied versions of the more general topic. My point is just that since we’re teaching transferable skills like critical thinking and communication and planning, why not teach specific skills too you might use while we’re at it?
I assume the gut reaction of most people is to reject this because typically people dislike subjects the less “pure” they are. I feel like there are two actual arguments against this apart from just this feeling.
The first is that teaching applied subjects requires prior knowledge of the pure versions. I’m not sure about this. There are skills that you’d rely on to interpret the new subject, which you learned in the old subject. I feel like the skills could also be taught in the new subject, without the old subject at all. However it might be a more patchy and inefficient education. For instance, I feel like maths should still be taught since it comes up everywhere (but also almost all the maths I ever did has come up in physics or computer science too, so I could have just learned that). If it comes up everywhere perhaps I could have learned it there instead.
The second good objection might be that it’s simpler to start at the basics and work your way up through the complexity. This is probably completely correct. However, if we can’t find a way to skip over sections of learning, we will one day find that you can only teach humans so much of the total sum of human knowledge before they are 18. If we advance beyond that point as a society, then we will never be able to educate anyone beyond there. So really I feel like we have to tackle the problem of making complexities feel like basics. Having said that, this might mean simply skipping parts of the subject instead of teaching a different subject entirely.
Then there’s the whole argument that the basics and history are fundamental parts of the subject that you need in order to work any further in with it. This is probably true. I can’t think of any good examples where not teaching the basics is the better option.
So if you think you can deal with these two counter arguments, I’m interested.
