“Don’t Stay in School” video: Why I support it as a preservice teacher
There was a video posted to Youtube in February 2015 with the title “Don’t stay in school”. It is a rap by a guy who feels his education did was not ideal. He raps about the things he didn’t learn and felt he should’ve. The video is embedded below and here is a link to the video on Youtube. I really like this video. Now, before you all come running after me with fire and pitchforks, please give me a chance to explain.
I don’t support every point made in the video. Obviously, I do not support dropping out of school. However, this guy makes some very good points about our current education system. Now, I should note that I believe this guy is from the UK, so he would he is referring to their education system, but many of his points can apply the the US education system as well.
The rapper, whose channel name is Boyinaband, says how he wasn’t taught the laws of his country, his basic human rights, or about his political system. There are students who graduate high school, and they don’t know how to register to vote. They don’t know the basic laws of our country and do not understand how our political system works. These are basic things that every citizen should know. How can we expect citizens of this country to make informed voting decisions, if they don’t understand the political system and how it works?
Boyinaband discusses how he hasn’t learned anything about mental disorders or “diseases with preventable causes”, and learned the Hippocratic method for treating illnesses, but not the modern way to treat illnesses. In today’s society, we really need to start discussing mental health. We can no longer put it on the back burner, and pretend that every single person is completely sound mentally. We need to start teaching our students how to identify depression and anxiety, and how to cope with these problems if they are dealing with them. Depression and anxiety disorders are becoming more and more common, and we cannot keep pretending it isn’t a problem. Students should feel comfortable talking about these problems instead of feeling uncomfortable whenever the phrase mental illness comes up. Society’s view of mental illness will never change if it is never talked about in school.
Basically, to sum up everything Boyinaband says, he basically says that the education he received wasn’t practical. He learned the quadratic equation, the old American west, and about mitochondria, but didn’t learn how to get a job or a mortgage, the political system of his country, or how to pay taxes. We don’t really teach these things in our school systems. I never learned how to get a mortgage, file taxes, balance a checkbook, create a household budget, etc. Shouldn’t we not only be learning academics in school, but also practical life skills? Now, there may be some schools that teach these things. In central PA and Erie county PA, there is a program called Your Employability Skills (YES program). I took the class and learned how to fill out a job application, went through a mock interview, and learned about different things in the workplace, and completed a simulations where I ran a business or went through life as a person and had to pay bills, buy insurance,etc. However, not every school can offer this, and this specific program is only available in PA, and it still didn’t teach me every life skill, it just taught me skills needed to get a job. This class is a step in the right direction of schools teaching more practical life skills, but its an elective, and not everyone has the opportunity to take it.
Now, some may argue that its the parents job to teach their kids how to budget money, file taxes, etc. Not every child is going to have educated parents. Maybe their parents work a lot, and their parents don’t have the time to teach them those skills. Maybe they live in poverty, and don’t have the opportunity to learn those things from their parents because they are too concerned with getting food and finding places to spend the night. Each student we encounter is going to have a different home life, and the only way we can ensure that students will have those life skills, is to teach them those life skills ourselves.
Now, we can work some of these practical skills into already existing classes. Talk about the political systems in your social studies classes. Teach your students how to follow the presidential race. My teacher did this when I was in high school. We followed the race and watched clips from the debate. This teacher also showed us a video that showed how to use electronic voting machine, and he gave the papers needed to register to vote in our state so we could register to vote in elections. Did it mean that some classes we didn’t do the work directly out of the textbook? Yes. Did we learn real world skills by following something that was happening in our political system? Absolutely. Set aside time once a week or once every other week to talk about current events so that students actually know what is going on in our country and our world.
Another important thing, is we need to connect our subjects to the real world so that students can see their importance. Students should not be asking the question “Why do we have to learn this? What is the point?” Make those connections to show them the point. Not only will real world connections help them to understand why they need to know the information, but it will also help them understand information better if they have something to connect it to.
So, while academics are important, so are practical life skills. Schools need to focus on both of these things to prepare students to live in the real world.
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