This idea is overused as heavily dependant on which school you go to. My school taught a finance course, and gave advice on job seeking and interviews.
Also, mitochondria is usually taught at GCSE in the UK at least, which is not the last year of school. 'Mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell' is very much a meme, it might have been interesting to use any other piece of useless information taught in schools instead.
My favorite part of the "mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell" memes (especially when cited as useless info being taught in school) is that it's grammatically incorrect. Mitochondria ARE because the word is plural, and any self respecting biology teacher knows that. The fact that this is cited as something drilled into students minds when people can't even recite it back properly is hilarious.
Finances are taught in all schools in the UK, but statistics show that the majority of people don't remember shit and then make financial mistakes their whole life. And then they complain they're poor, lol.
Because the last five years have shown, that we have spend way to much time teaching people biology.
That's exactly what I always say when people repeat this.
Imo, it's more an erosion of critical thinking rather than a lacking of specific biology facts.
Ok. So. Here’s my take.
No high schooler is EVER gonna pay even the slightest bit of attention if we incorporate a “taxes and accounting” class. No shot.
We learn certain general subjects like this in science mainly to learn critical thinking, analytical/logical reasoning skills, how to apply the scientific method (which, yes, can come in handy in many areas of life besides science).
No high schooler is EVER gonna pay even the slightest bit of attention if we incorporate a “taxes and accounting” class. No shot.
Ask any teacher who's taught it and they'll confirm. People just like to bullshit. They lie about not being taught things they were taught too. I'll bet many had a lesson that went over tax brackets etc and they just ignored it
Most of the people I know that complain about not being taught "real life skills" are absolute dumbasses that would have refused to pay attention anyway.
I had also been told this about something before where the guy had poured water on a flat top grill. As it was boiling off be was like "man this is real life right here, if school taught things like this I'd have paid attention" and I was like they did idiot you just didn't pay attention that's literally just water boiling smh lol
We learn certain general subjects like this in science mainly to learn critical thinking, analytical/logical reasoning skills, how to apply the scientific method (which, yes, can come in handy in many areas of life besides science).
Given your previous claim:
No high schooler is EVER gonna pay even the slightest bit of attention if we incorporate a “taxes and accounting” class. No shot.
What makes you think that they'd be any more likely to pay attention to any other subject matter?
[…] No high schooler is EVER gonna pay even the slightest bit of attention if we incorporate a “taxes and accounting” class. No shot. […]
Assuming that some high schoolers aren't going to pay attention to the lesson, wouldn't it still be better to at least try to teach something that has real life practical use rather than something that doesn't? At least the people who do pay attention will gain something useful — it doesn't make much sense to me to reduce the overall usefulness of what's taught simply because some may not pay attention.
Well, I am unsure if I agree with that, as my business management class, which had pretty ordinary coursework about it without really anything 'exciting', had a vast majority of students paying tons of attention and actually learning, and half of the class was the stereotypical lazy bum students who acted macho and popular even though everyone hated them.
Although, the people who failed that class failed to the most catastrophic degree, as everyone else was well above passing, certain students got an overall score from 10 to 30% in total for all assessments.
I'm not too sure how standard this type of class is, so the success rate of accounting or other classes could be highly varied
Ah yes learning critical thinking
Here is a series of indisputable statements.
Mitochondria are membrane-bound organelles found in most eukaryotic cells, and they are often referred to as the 'powerhouses of the cell' because they generate adenosine triphosphate (ATP), the cell's primary energy currency, through a process called oxidative phosphorylation. They have a double-membrane structure, with the inner membrane folded into cristae to increase surface area for energy production. Mitochondria contain their own circular DNA, which is separate from the nuclear DNA, and this allows them to produce some of their own proteins. They are believed to have originated from a symbiotic relationship between ancient eukaryotic cells and free-living prokaryotes, a theory known as the endosymbiotic theory. In addition to energy production, mitochondria play roles in cell signaling, apoptosis (programmed cell death), and calcium homeostasis.
Have you learned critical thinking yet?
I'm not sure how you think critical thinking works. Do you have some sort of magical logic flow that doesn't requiere some base understanding of facts?
Guy trying to sell quartz as "energy enhancing crystals" -> no understanding as to how body energy works -> might be legit, let's give it a try
Guy trying to sell quartz as "energy enhancing crystals" -> knowing that available body energy is dictated by ATP and has nothing to do with crystals -> this smells like a scam
Critical thinking is about being able to apply knowledge of what you know to what you are currently being told. You need some basis of real, provable facts for it, which is why if you had a bio course, you also likely had some lab component to it as well.
Sure, I hear you cry, but all of that information isn't something I need to know basically ever! Well, you're correct, but a fun thing about learning is that the deeper you cut into a subject, the more you remember. You probably wouldn't remember much if the entire unit only said "mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell".
And doing these deep cuts to reinforce the basics of understanding work. There is a reason that "mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell" is a meme, and it's because everyone remembers that part, not nessessarily the part that they have their DNA that is always inherented from your mother and is referred to as mDNA.
I hope this helps you to think critically against the continued push against critical thinking, particularly to the claim that what you learned in school has nothing to do with doing it.
I see what you're getting at, and you're not wrong to think about how the lessons we teach kids from the minds and skills we want them to have. There's positives and negatives to the liberal arts education, and it could be said that it is just as much of what is left out then what is kept in. The choice to teach about mitochondria and not the Krebs Cycle is odd from a scientific perspective, but if you know about endosymbiosis then it's a lot harder to accept that all organisms appeared independently a few millennia ago. But once you view a liberal arts education from this perspective then you see these biases everywhere. For example, how many world history classes talk about the Tamil Kings, or the Warring States period of China? It's a lot easier to other a region you don't know the history of.
So we have to ask, what purpose should education serve? What knowledge and skills should we expect people to have by the time they reach adulthood? Add what is the best way to disseminate those?
It would probably make more sense to ask the bio teacher for sex ed than economics.
Lol. Mainstream economics is nothing but ideologically charged excuses for the status quo. And you wouldn't learn heterodox econ in high school anyways.
At least we do know how mitochondria works.
Mainstream economics is nothing but ideologically charged excuses for the status quo.
Would you mind defining exactly what you mean by "mainstream economics"?
Anything that's not heterodox. Neoclassicists, Chicago school, etc.
It has been taught, you weren't listening during math/economy classes dipshit
This is what used to be taught in home economics class. Now it's just sewing and baking.
Knowing math isn't always enough to navigate the oft poorly written tax forms.
Tax forms change. And some little shit complaining "why do we have to learn percentages? Teach us something useful like how to do our taxes." would make for a better joke. And it would be more accurate.
I have never heard of an economy class in high school. And our math teacher did a tiny thing on compound interest in general when we finished a quiz early.
So I don't know what school you went to but it wasn't the normal one.
Frankly, we should move on from the mitochondria and start talking about the immune system. I want pre-schoolers to know about the interleukins, goddamnit! Let the children in first grade recite a list of adjuvants! And somebody
shootshoo away vaccine deniers!We need to train more medics in the Team Fortress 2 university, so they can shoo AND shoot vaccines at vaxx deniers
Instead of focusing on specific facts, what about focusing on honing the skills required to acquire and understand information?
But mitochondria is cool, it has its own dna because it used to be a separate organism. It fused with us, only to be made into a joke by us.
It also separates raw protons from hydrogen atoms and somehow turns it into spinny-motion, which it then turns into chemical energy with incredible efficiency. It’s a wild piece of biological machinery
Ok but I need to learn about hone economics and employer labour relations so as not to get financially exploited all my life.
Cause it’s the teacher making this decision, riiiiiiight
If we're going to scrap something from high school to add a tax lesson, let's ditch some literature. Over four years my graduating class studied 5 shakespeare plays and a handful of sonnets. Surely we could have cut out Much Ado About Nothing and The Tempest if we still have Romeo & Juliet, Hamlet and Henry V.
Reading comprehension is more important than ever ... And you want to cut the classes that teach it? Why?
I'm unconvinced that Shakespeare is a particularly good exercise in reading comprehension given the vocabulary, phraseology, spelling and grammar is 500 years out of date.
I remember reading Hamlet out loud in class, and that was the last of the plays we studied so we had read some Shakespeare before, and every other thing you're running into a sentence that doesn't work or a word that is NEVER said except in Hamlet like 'contumely" or 'orisons' and you just get a room full of teenagers saying words one by one taking none of it on board.
What exactly would you want to remove, and what would you propose in its stead, and why?
Surely we could have cut out Much Ado About Nothing and The Tempest
The only subject that was required for all four years when I was in high school was English, and senior year English was all British literature, so we got Chaucer, Shakespeare, the Bronte's, shit like that.
Honestly I think later high school English classes do more to beat any love of reading teenagers have out of them by force feeding them dire dour old ugly hateful and just plain obsolete shit written by damaged people who lived in a world before the invention of epidemiology so sometimes your neighborhood would die of cholera because someone's pit toilet leaked into the ground water.
Make English 4 if not English 3 electives rather than required. Replace them with a semester of driver's ed, taxes, fire safety, how to safely refrigerate chicken, I can think of a lot of shit that would benefit the world more than having teenagers read a Skakespeare play they don't get aloud.
People seem to be conflating economics and personal finance.
Right, because you would go to science class and learn economics.
It'd be like asking your economics teachers why you're not being taught English.
I had a prof describe the nucleus as "the powerhouse of cell function". Dude was straight up sowing chaos - he knew what he was doing.
Bio is like a freshman/sophomore course. If you're taking it senior year, you're already behind in life
You only have one year of bio in high school?
Unless you take AP, where they wouldn't be harping on this particular line about mitochondria, yes. One year of bio.
It's different in different regions and it's certainly moved around over the years.
And the point remains, we graduate students who know what the powerhouse of a cell is but not how to do their taxes, work a 401k, put together a realistic budget, plan for major purchases, make a work schedule, or have any saleable skills other than being able bodied.
We aren't preparing people for life, we're warehousing them until college and if they don't go to college we just shove them into the cracks.
I understood the point, I agree with that. I wasn't commenting on that part
God forbid anyone taking a different path in life than you...
School systems set the path, and it's pretty standardized when these subjects get taught. They wait until kids get more math skills for physics classes to take place, meaning the less math heavy subjects go first, like bio and earth science.
Hey! I resemble that remark!
I'm like "you guys didn't discuss economics and taxes in school???" ...I'm pretty sure we did at some point in both civic studies and some corner of math.
If you thought it was important to learn taxes, write a CV or the usual complaints you'd spend an afternoon googling it and get a pretty good idea.
Hot take but if you need school to teach you how to pay your taxes there is something wrong with your taxe system.
