School leavers should know how to cook a meal, handle domestic finances, take part in a debate, enjoy the theatre and use the internet.

Force someone to ejoy theater (or music, or movies,...) is completely utterly dud. You can expose them (and hope they find something they enjoy) but demand that they like it so silly.

Handle domestic finances is a GR34T idea, I think, because it'll be good for everyone involved: less debts.

i don't even understand my payslip to be honest.

Lex, best way is to leave everything till your chore day (which is Saturday late morning/early afternoon for me) and then do it all in one go. You never forget everything, only takes 10 minutes online, and you don't get sent evil letters threatening you with bad things.

he knows that they are two separate things => above average political knowledge i fear

i don't have a chore day - this may be the root of several organisational issues i have :(

i don't even understand my payslip to be honest.

Unfortunately for all of my fine talk above this is so OTM it's painful :(

;-)

other things on payslip:

NI = National Insurance. everyone pays this, it means that if you are jobless you can claim unemployment benefits etc, also funds NHS.

Pension? = unless you've specifically opted in, i'm surprised you're paying to a pension scheme...

any other questions?

freelance earnings on top of the rest is a chore. but you can probably claim records purchased, computer, etc against.

how do people KNOW WHAT TO DO???

(Though IIRC, in lots of schools, only girls took Home Economics and boys took Shop or something.)

there was a class called 'life skills' in sixth form at my school, it encompassed things like it skills, and possibly tax returns (i do onot know what a tax return is?). i didn't go to them because i did 4 a-levels.

like: how to fix a radiator.

fixed

like: how to fix a radiator.

omg! i learnt that apparently radiators have, like, WATER in them the other day - gareth couldn't believe i didn't know before. i can't imagine this really, i don't know where the water would go.

Actually, the school I went to was very very good about this - however, it taught me about the Merkin political system, in which I cannot legally participate. I know next to nothing about the British system - in which I legally can.

(They probably got a kickback from McDonalds for the training.)

on the other hand, i had a plumber come out to stop the flow of water through mine because i had no clue how. it involved a very basic screwdriver operation. mortifying.

more important is the ability to follow multi-part television drama.

Handling domestic finances and using the internet would be good things to learn in school. Enjoying theater and cooking are asking a little much though.

I learned this the hard way. Easy option, my arse!

As is I think everybody should just get the Achewood Cookbook.

Home finances - this is totally on yr parents isn't it? I never learned jack shit about bills and credit in school at all.

certainly, it's rather more important than "enjoying the theatre". WTF with the cultural fascism, tony, you dick? what's next: i have to "enjoy sport"?

my parents were complete shit in this area (as in most things) so therefore not good role models. I wish I had learned it in school.

yr not British, then?

All school literature classes are basically forcing uninterested and uncaring children to sit through literature and not grow into uninterested and uncaring adults. I think it has to do some small amount of good, even if it's not totally transformative and the source of a lifelong love of literature. And would teaching children not to mire themselves in horrific debt-laden misery would actually take much longer than teaching one complete Shakespeare play?

super xxxpost.

(And as a side issue, our received-wisdom shorthand for high-culture experiences tend to revolve around things that are increasingly archaic, like ballet, opera, and poetry. Thing is, if you're just shooting for that big-picture goal -- winding up with kids who are able to be open-minded and think critically about art and culture -- you can just as easily develop that with a lot of different media. I suppose the obvious example these days would be the number of people who wind up learning to think this way by being music geeks, but a more apt approach might be to read fiction not in terms of testing students' comprehension, but as something they might have aesthetic opinions about.)

I mean, that's not a knock on any of those things -- it's just a flat fact that the art forms average people most strongly associate with Proper High Culture tend to be old and not incredibly vibrant or relevant in modern terms. The ballets and operas people think of as cultured and sophisticated are centuries old; it shouldn't be controversial to point out that these formats peaked a very long time ago, and aren't exactly major forms of expression in the modern-day US or UK. Poetry does a little better, relevance-wise, but much like ballet and opera, it's largely supported by small academic circles and arts philanthropy and grants, not any kind of significant public audience -- and once again, the names that would come up on a Family Feud board for "name a high-culture poet" were all buried hundreds of years ago. Classical music: the same.* (And I think we all know that when laymen talk about the need to appreciate these things, they are not usually talking about exposing children to cutting-edge dance choreography or 21st century microtonal compositions.) I'm glad there are people who keep these forms alive, and people who keep them pushing forward in new directions, and I'm happy to see the many ways in which they still have profound effects on a lot of people -- all sorts of people -- but it'd be insane to claim they're particularly vibrant or prevalent or popular media for artistic expression in the 21st century (even among the educated upper classes who made them seem important centuries ago).

(* Classical music is actually a bit more like soccer in the U.S. -- the kind of thing a lot of people are involved in when they're young and yet turn out not to be massive consumers of across the rest of their lives. But obviously even the kind of puffed-up semiclassical and opera music that's moderately popular is like deliberately archaic, all plush curtains and violin soloists in corsets and "look, this is cultured old-Europe stuff" -- on some level it's playing to the very same "eat your vegetables" vibe that's behind telling kids this stuff is where sophisticated High Culture lives.)

From 1990 to 2004, over 172 new operatic works were produced by professional opera companies in North America. (Source: OPERA America)

and there's at least one opera company of some sort in every city in America with a metro population > 1 million (excepting Las Vegas, Buffalo, and OKC, but there are opera companies in Reno, Erie, and Tulsa, respectively).

Opera and (semi-)classical are doing damned well right now, but -- like I said -- basically in a tarted-up archivist's sense, pretty much just finding as many large-breasted blonde soloists as possible and soaring on guys like Boccelli, who just about no one with any knowledge of the art form thinks is particularly talented in the least. It's doing decently well as a kind of lifestyle music right now, which, yes, probably makes it more alive than usual. (Although maybe not -- surely this stuff is on a continuum with people buying millions of Mantovani records in the 50s and 60s, or endless film soundtracks during the 80s.) But for the most part I don't see people engaging with it in any kind of committed or analytical way, which is the whole teaching opportunity we're talking about -- it seems to me that the bulk of sales of this kind of stuff are going to people who were not previously interested in classical music, and then hit a certain age and found the top-40 stations were all hip-hop these days, and were suddenly taken with either throwing on some Norah Jones or dabbling in showy, easily digestable, stagily old-Europe classical.

Anyway, we really don't need to argue about exactly how popular and/or archaic opera is: my fairly minor point was that the formats we point schoolkids to in order to teach them about high art are ones that have significantly fallen off as the dominant or most current forms of the present. The top-level popular conception of high art consists mostly of stuff that's centuries old, to the point where for the average person, the concept of "artistically sophisticated" is more or less not distinguished from the concept of "very old and European and with fancy dresses."

the number of US adults who attended at least one opera performance in 2002 exceeded the number who attended at least one nickelback performance in 2006 many times over, and was twice the number of adults+kids who bought 2006's biggest selling album. the number of adults who experienced opera in some form during that year exceeded the number of adults+kids who have ever purchased an album by willie nelson, bob dylan, def leppard or the backstreet boys.

more than half the operas in the standard repertoire are less than 150 years old, and about 30% are from the 20th century

that's attendance in one year compared to sales over as much as 40 years

well no, the whole point of high culture is that it isn't pop

more than triple, actually, but CFL attendance was more than three times that of Canadian opera attendance

'experience', actually, not attendance

YES, WE KNOW SHAKESPEARE MADE A FEW KNOB JOKES. GET OVER IT.

I WANT CHEAP SERIOUS ELITIST THEATRE!!

er, nothing else to add, really. other than "nabisco OTM", but i feel such truisms should be banned from the sandbox and indeed from nuILX :)