More Things That are No Longer Taught in School 

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Same age as Simon and from the UK - everyone (boys and girls) did both Food Tech and Design & Tech until they got to choose their GCSEs and then....everyone dropped both. Simon just went to a posh, old-fashioned school. And one of my male friends went on to work in Michelin star restaurants. So pretty useful for him!

One of the first things they showed us in agriculture class was pictures of what happens when you arent careful around farm equipment

Y’all should do one about things that should stop being taught in school

18:05 that sort of thing happened to me in an English vocabulary test (in a German school) filled out everything with correct translations, but they said "we don't test if you know how to speak English, we are testing if you learned the vocabulary we told you to learn" and gave me what would be an F in other countries. Feckin hell, that was 15 years ago and I'm still annoyed.

I am 61, I attended a rural school in the USA. I took Home Economics from grade 7 through grade 12. We were never taught how to make a budget, how to figure interest, or how to fill out a job application or unemployment benefits forms, or where to go for help with utilities etc. They "taught" us cooking; basically I was taught cooking at home, through chores, peeling vegetables and fruits, making bread, pie pastry, proper temperatures for cooking meats all the way through etc. We were "taught" sewing, my Mom was a seamstress in a factory and we all learned to sew on her sewing machine, we mended rips in clothes, we made outfits for work, for play, for formal dances etc. We had a class senior year grade 12 call " Married Life" It covered dating, sex education, (which the district I went to taught every year since grade 3, by year 12 I could have stood and given a talk from memory of all the years previous), cooking, cleaning, and sewing. They never taught us about drunk husbands beating their wives and kids, they never taught us to call the police or any social services agency. On the other hand, my brothers taught me to measure boards for repairs to the barn and chicken house, my brothers taught me to hand them wrenches by the fraction number. My father taught me to use a bumper jack to change a car tire, and how to pump my own gas, and eventually to change the oil and filter, and spark plugs and wires. I learned everything in these last 3 to 4 lines by the time I was 11 years old, I drove a tractor in the fields, plowing, and sowing seed. Planting a garden and canning the produce we grew in that garden. I drove a grain truck to the Grain elevator to sell our grain, these I did for my family, from age 13 on into my late teen years. Everyone had chores, we worked, we learned and we grew up, most of us to make a better life, as our parents wanted us to achieve.

When I was in school “Home Ec”, as it was referred to, was just cooking and textiles ( basically making cakes and how to wash clothes). That was in the 90s.

I took Home Ec in the US in the 90s and loved every minute of it. It was me and 15 girls and we made cakes and stuffed animals : o )

1:20 - Mid roll ads 2:35 - Back to the video 4:30 - Chapter 1 - Home economics 10:15 - Chapter 2 - Metalwork, woodwork et cetera 15:30 - Chapter 3 - Proper computer programming 18:45 - Chapter 4 - You should tilt your head back if you get a nosebleed

The problem with drag and drop programming comes in when there’s a error that needs debugging.

Wow....Dave's snark is magnificent! And Julian's memes? Outstanding. That "photo" of Simon's sisters is priceless!

I'm only a few years older than Simon, but I am an avid DIYer? Calling someone to hang a picture is out of the question. I have personally replaced nearly all of my own plumbing and a good portion of the electrical in my home, remodeled my kitchen and fixed countless mechanical and electrical things over the years. the amount of money I've saved doing it myself is in the tens of thousands of dollars.

This is one of my biggest grievances. In school I got to take four cooking classes, a drafting and design class, a life after graduation class, an independent living class, a metal working class, two carpentry classes, two machine shop classes and three welding classes and this is all on top of the normal curriculum and I really thoroughly enjoyed it and now I know how to cook and weld and I went to a trade school because I felt like college wasn't for me

Simon’s idea of blue collar work - hanging up a picture.

My fiance and I are 10 years apart and even with that gap we've noticed differences between our school years education. Shocker - it got dumbed down over time. 😪 Specifically maths and history. I live in Canada and there was a lot lacking in indigenous history 🙁 Learned way more as an adult

In this day in age its always funny when people say "I didn't learn that in school", and act like they don't have the entire earth's knowledge in their pocket.

I asked Chat GPT to come up with a bunch of fake star signs and this was one of them: "Tangentarius (The Divergent Thinker) Dates: February 3 - February 23 Traits: Frequently goes off on tangents, sees connections others miss, and has a highly associative mind. Often sparks interesting, unexpected conversations."

I went to HS in the US about 20 years ago so my experience will be a bit different from the Home Economics experiences in the video, however I remember LOVING home ec in the early 2000s. It was the first class of the day and the only class with a coffee maker in the classroom. Our teacher was 100% ok with us starting a pot of coffee and sipping on it while we lightly napped or tried to wake up. Literally the first 30 minutes of that class was completely silent. It was also the only class I had with all of my friends and we did learn some useful things in there once everyone woke up. Home Economic taught me how to balance a checkbook, sew on a button, and do a basic grocery budget. We also got to cook and eat breakfast when we got to the cooking portion of the curriculum. Since we all pretty much already knew basic cooking, it was less learning how to cook and more having a breakfast feast with your friends every morning on the school's dime. It was only open to 11 and 12 graders (Juniors and Seniors, approximate 16-18 age range) because we were dealing with "dangerous" kitchen equipment, but my entire friend group took it for our first class both years.

In my US middle school (11-14 year olds) we had 12 weeks each of family consumer sciences where we learned cooking, sewing, nutrition, advertising tactics, etc; tech ed where we coded robots (very basic code), and did woodworking with band saws, electric sanders, and other tools like that; and art, plus a typing class in 6th grade.

On the subject of getting somebody else to do simple housework tasks like hanging a picture or changing a plug-sure, if you're making more per hour than what it cost to hire a professional to do it, and you don't find it fun to do it yourself, then it makes sense... But the thing is, if somebody else is going to do it for you, are you going to use the saved time to make money, or are you just gonna watch them do it instead of you... Because, no matter how much you earn per hour, if somebody else is not saving you the time, you're losing money by not doing it yourself.

Kids these days. They can’t send a telegraph, can’t attach a horse to a carriage, can’t fix an oil lamp…

I learned about personal finance from video games. Namely RPGs that had money. I actually learned how to read from video games as well, because I wanted to understand the manual(and later reading the text boxes in RPGs because this was LONG before voice acting). I learned basic math from video games. I did learn how to cook in school, but I learned proper cooking etiquette from a Sesame Street episode where Elmo learned how to cook. I learned how to be a decent human being and communication skills from my parents(at one point schools here did try to teach that). My numbers and shapes from Sesame Street. The only thing my schools tried to teach me was how to read(by the time I got to that point I had known how to read for over a year), algebra(of which I have never once used), music(which didn't teach me how to read sheet music, just how to properly handle and use certain instruments), physical education(a fancy name for essentially learning how to throw a ball) and History(this was literally the only subject I liked, and I still learned more about history from the internet than I did in school). By the time schools where I lived got around to teaching anything related to computers, I already knew more about them than the teacher because I had had a PC in my home for several years by this point. Not saying I was some form of genius or anything, just that the school education portion was extremely lacking. I was the kid that would install games on the class computers, and the one that kept bypassing the school's efforts at stopping games from being installed. I even programmed my own game on one of the school computers after reading a how-to guide in a magazine on the subject. I was reprimanded for this because "games are not a productive use of time", and my game was promptly deleted with no chance for me to back it up. Most everything I know and use regularly today, I learned outside of school on my own. Granted, it should be noted that my schooling time occurred in the '80s and '90s. Computers were still seen as a nerds domain(and worthy of being beaten up over), and there were still quite a few hang-ups going around, like Home Economics were for girls, shop class was for boys, and you avoided teaching anything other than white history unless it was absolutely unavoidable. As messed up as this might sound, my high school had a language course called "Ebonics", which was labeled as "how to talk to black people". Yeeeaaahh. That language course lasted two years, then was pulled without a word. Shout out to all the '80s and '90s teachers who tried to convince their students that they wouldn't always have a calculator available to perform math calculations. I have three of them at any given time. And not because I need them, but because they are just always there. One in my phone, one in my watch, and one on my computer because most of my work is done on a computer any way(laptop, so it comes with me when I go out anywhere). Shout out to Dave for hating school about as much as I did!

In the late '50s, a male classmate had the career plan to become a chef. He wanted to take Home Ec, but they wouldn't let him, because he had too many Y chromosomes.

Paying someone to hang pictures is wild

That home ec class example blew my mind. I was in high school in the early 90's in Canada, and we had two classes that everyone (boys and girls) had to take mandatory in grade 8 - one was a semester each of Cooking/Sewing/Typing and Economic planning, and the other was one semester each of Woodworking, Metalworking, Electronics and Art, just so that every student had a basis to judge if they wanted to take further courses in those areas in later grades. I don't think Home Ec being for women only has been a thing here since the 1970's.

As a woman I was not allowed, by my parents, to take woodworking or shop(car maintenance) in school, (because they felt that those classes were only for guys), I also wasn't allowed to take art (because they thought it wouldn't serve me in the future) and refused to take home-ec because I knew they wanted me to... now I suck at everything, lol, at least I have youtube to teach me how to change a tire! just let your kids go do stuff, they'll probably hate what they thought they'd love, and losing part of a finger in shop class builds character, lol.

The man. The myth. The legend. FACT BOI!

When mom and dad both work, kids learn home economics for survival. Struggle with telling right from wrong, but you can't have everything

11:25 when I took “shop” class way back in 2001 (around 11 years old for me, US), we called it IA, for Industrial Arts

When my dad was in school, he fought to take Home Economics. He was the first boy in the school to take it. By the time I got there, it was separated in cooking class (which I didn’t take), sewing (which I took but my dad taught me when I was way younger). I did take wood shop in junior high (middle school).

I did home economics which covered sewing, basic cooking and basic woodwork in the 70's. The girls were encouraged to get comfortable with a screwdriver etc and the boys a needle and thread. Later we did health education which covered kitchen higene, nutrition and hand washing for clothes. It was hilarious when it came to contraception as we knew more kinds than the teacher.

9:42 NGL Simon… If he started a basic cooking channel, it’d fit right in and get PLENTY of views. 😂

Simon's tangents are even funnier when you realize he's in a room by himself talking to a camera

I'm 31 and was never taught coding either in secondary school or during 2 years of ICT in College. We didn't even have computers in primary school until I was in year 4.

I really appreciate home ec. and shop class. Home Ec. taught me how to do basic stitching sewing. So I could repair my own clothes. Shop class. I made this really cool lamp out of metal. Everyone else opted to make the Woodworking lamps, and I noticed the metal shop in the back of the room.

In Canada, in the 70's we had Industrial Arts (or "Shop") and Home Economics (or "Home Ec."). We only had these in Grade 7 and 8 in elementary school. I went to a small private high school, which didn't offer either. Boys had to take Shop class for 2 of the 3 school terms, and girls had to take Home Ec. for the same 2 terms. You could switch for the third term, but the catch was that you had to find a kid of the opposite sex who also wanted to switch, which was nearly impossible. So, effectively boys and girls were stuck in their assigned class for the entire school year.

I grew up in Canada in a forestry town and we had a full wood workshop and metal workshop.. the teachers would just scream at everyone to keep them from dicking around and hurting themselves lol

In 1970 I was sent to school with bus fare on my own at age 5. On the way home I would often spend the money on sweets and walk back home. Nowadays they'd probably call the police.

Shout out to the editor 😆 Always an adventure on Brain Blaze!

My school district did the full gambit for HomEc, but they did it in 6-8th grade. (Read to the end, I promise you it won't disappoint). They started off by unleashing a bunch of 11 and 12 year olds into a room full of sewing machines to make a simple gym bag, resulting in multiple pierced thumbs, one of which had gone through bone and needed to be surgically removed. (Apparently this was an ongoing issue for a few years at this point). Next they did simple cooking such as popping a can of Pillsbury biscuits (the American kind) and baking them per manufacturers instructions. In 7th grade, they moved on to diet and nutrition along with slightly more advanced home cooking, followed by trying to get a bunch of 12 and 13 year olds to focus on lessons about budgeting, home finance and filing tax forms. GOOD LUCK WITH THAT! In 8th grade they taught you how to do laundry (separating by temperature and color, using the right cleaning products, how to remove various types of stains, hand sewing, ironing, &c). Instead of cooking, it switched to child rearing. The first one was a glorified sack of rice hulls. My bus driver's son puked in the carrying tub when my back was turned so I marched it right to that teachers desk, plopped it down and walked out with her yelling at me to clean it up. She "filed" child abuse charges against me and had me "served" in the cafeteria, at which point my parents reported her to the principle, reminding them that it is illegal to ALLOW a student to clean up a biohazard, such as blood or vomit and that calling a CHILD out for "child abuse" in front of the whole school could be quite damaging to mental health and reputation. The SECOND baby was electronic and recorded response time, tilt and g-shock events. Mine malfunctioned on the final evening and WOULD NOT STOP CRYING. My parents got so pissed about it keeping them up that they tried to "care" for it themselves then gave up and shoved it in the fireplace with a pillow over the speaker and closed the doors to muffle the sound. Fortunately, the batteries died by morning. UNfortunately, that same teacher tried to pull the same stunt again on top of giving me a 30% on the assignment because the thing reset when she swapped out the batteries so she couldn't see any actual score. The school got another phone call, this time on the direct line to the superintendent. I suspect my mom threatened to report them at the state level since she was a retired teacher and knew some pretty weighty names at the time. Either that or my aunt, who was the personal secretary to a county judge, had a strongly worded letter written to the school on some judicial stationary. Either way, the teacher was quickly forced to write an apology letter and fill in a score that matched my current GPA. It's not like she was targeting just me, either. In fact, I was one of her favorite students, constantly getting praised for my cooking and hand sewing (which my dad had been teaching me from a very young age). She was just batshite frackin' crazy. Another parent called in about her after an entire lesson that was centered around hunting for hidden meanings in song lyrics, focusing heavily on stalking and SA. I have NO idea how she managed to keep her job that year.

19:19 SCOTT STERLING! What a Legend!

My husband actually did set our kitchen on fire trying to boil water lol! Actually it was a pretty awful experience.

I’m from the States and I took Home Ec in middle school in the mid-90s. It was one of my favorite classes. We learned to cook 3 dishes: one breakfast dish, one dinner entree, and one dessert. Mostly it was so we learned how to read a recipe, how to measure ingredients, and a few basic cooking techniques and terms. We had a unit on sewing where we got to make some pajama shorts. It focused on how to use a pattern, how to use a sewing machine, how to make a buttonhole and sew on a button, and a little bit of hand stitching. We had an “egg baby” unit, where we were given an egg that we had to keep safe for a week. We had a nutrition unit. We had a unit on finances (which included balancing a checkbook, credit, and taxes). And we had a health unit that had sex ed lessons that were more informative and less “it always ends in pregnancy and/or death!” than the official school sex ed. About 1/4 of my home Ec class were boys, so it wasn’t that unusual for guys to take that class. I was disappointed when my own kid started middle school a couple years ago and I found out that his school got rid of Home Ec just before Covid. The necessary supplies and electrical costs were too expensive, apparently.

I loved wood shop in middle school, made me choose to go to vo-tech in high school for machine shop. I spent most of my time there, with my friends, running an assembly line of "smoking devices" on the lathes 😂 we made so much money selling those things lol. Here I am now, 11 years since graduation, and now a fully fledged machinist lol

Definitely did not expect the Linus/LTT meme 🤣

I'm Canadian, and I'm old. When I was in school, boys and girls took cooking and sewing classes. Same thing with woodworking and electronics.

As someone who got a computer science degree and started my college career in 2000, I'm with Dave. I had to learn to write up my program either on notepad, saved to either a . Java or . C++ file , or typing it straight in CMD and then having to telnet in to save my programs and then compile and ensure it ran. And I absolutely know the endless pain of combing through my program to find which stupid semicolon or which object I forgot to close out. That is a special pain that students do not get to deal with. And yes I am jealous but also there's just something different about writing and memorizing just all the garbage you had to start your program off with, remembering which variables you already used, and then after taking an hour to write it the joy when it FINALLY compiles and doesn't spit out garbage. But Simon is also right, it is kind of boomerish of us... Dang kids.

There are only ever about 2 people on the planet at a time that actually know how to write original code. Everyone else just copies their code to make ours do what we want.

My middle school (US) had Shop and Home Ec. in the early 90s. Loved shop so much, it is the reason why I have a woodshop today.

Here in Australia, boys did Home Ec with the girls up to year 10. Textiles, garment construction were electives along with art, ceramics etc. In year 9 and 10 we did a subject called Consumer Education which covered budgets, accounting, legal stuff like jury duty and the small claims court, how to write checks, deposit and withdraw money, how to vote, basic politics, resume writing and job hunting. Home Economics was cooking and serving food, making desserts, cooking main meals including meat cooking and vegies, pastry making and so on. We girls also had an opportunity to do metal work, wood work, graphic art as electives, along with typing. I learned to soldeer, cut metal, drill etc. Mind you, dad taught me how to change a fuse, change tyres, change a car fuse, use a drill or a hammer etc as a kid. In those days, if you wanted to be a plumber, builder etc, you would leave a general high school at 14 or 15, and go to a technical school which had its lessons more leaning towards the trades. Many folk started an apprenticeship around 15 or 16 and would have classes for a week every month or so, while working with a fully qualified tradesman.

When I went to University my college taught loads of PE Teachers.....I can concur...most were thick!!😅😅😅😅😅

I've been told that most Shop or Vocational Tech classes have been deleted from middle and high school, which blows my mind... I took Vocational Tech, aka Shop class when I was 11 in middle school. The only tool we weren't allowed to use, was the tablesaw. For projects requiring the tablesaw, you would do everything up to that step, then bring your project to the shop teacher, and he would do the cuts. Also, looking back on it, our shop class building was kind of crazy... We had a wood shop (band saws, belt/disc sanders, lathes, planers, jointers, drillpresses, etc) a metal fabrication shop (metal brake and benders, spot welders, arc welders, a molten metal forge, etc) a plastic forming bending as well as resin casting shop, electronics soldering, and small engine repairs. They had woodracks full of exotic lumber, racks of steel, plastic, etc. They dismantled all but the woodshop a few years after I got to highschool, and closed the woodshop when I graduated. I guess all that stuff was a bit much for 10 to 13 year old kids, even though it had been there for the last 20 years....

I’m gen X. Went to Home Ec. class in 1979-1981. Curriculum was for girls and boys, things like maintaining a bank account, sensible grocery shopping, cooking and yes, basic sewing. It was not sexist and was in fact quite balanced and practical. I lived in a disadvantaged rural area. I feel like sometimes people confuse the late 20th century with the late 19th.

This is very specific to the author. I as a male did home economics in the 90s. Also there were a few girls in my shop class.

Grad in 2009 and we had awesome home economics classes in NY. Finances and taxes, cooking and nutrition, even learned how to sew by hand or machine

As someone who graduated in 2023, the expectations in school SUCK. Yes, there have been some improvements in certain classes (ie, history & english), but the expectations were so low that I learned I didn't need to try. I skipped around 3/4 of my high-school classes and graduated with high honors, a 3.98 GPA, & nearly top of the class. The standards are incredibly low. That being said, we still learn home-ec equivalents in the US. I took classes on cooking, baking, pastries, food & restaurant service, food science, wood working, metal work, infant care, sewing, fashion analysis, design, interior design, and architecture. However, it is now co-ED (thank god).

Australia still has DT! 🇦🇺 Lots of wonky step-stools and bulky “treasure” boxes in my house.. Home Economics is still alive and kicking too... Felted pouches and a knowledge of how to make homemade pizzas is still celebrated…

I missed Home Econ by changing schools before it was offered and my new school didnkt have the space or resource to offer it. My best friend’s mom essentially taught me hpw to cook, my mother and grandmother (dad’s mom) taught me how to sew and do needlepoint (cross stitch, knitting, et al), and I learned laundry and dish washing my being a good daughter and helping my mother at home. My mom also taught me how to iron (sort of, she basically just said keep the iron moving and check the label before setting the temperature).

I did Home Ec in a public UK school as it was for both boys and girls, and CDT was also for boys and girls. I learnt how to cook and sew, and I really enjoyed the cooking parts of HE especially after being able to eat what you cooked, and sometimes you had to try what others had cooked as well. The sewing part was kinda boring, but as a single person it has become very useful when I need to repair something, and I do have a small sewing machine for more advanced repairs and alterations. I also learnt more advanced cooking from my Mum as she taught me how to cook things like Sunday roasts, and how to make things from scratch.

I live in England, and was a teenager in the '70s. In maths, we were taught about hire purchase. I can't remember much about working out percentages - but it taught me an important lesson. If you bought stuff on hp, it cost more because of the interest - so why not wait until you save the money? ( I know it's not always possible - such as getting a mortgage to buy a house.) Later, after I got married I'd buy some items from catalogues, where you could pay the total amount over 20 to 30 weeks. (There was no interest to pay) With bigger items I would save at least half the amount before ordering.

I was a primary school teacher in Australia for about 10 years. We were still supposed to teach handwriting. I never did it. I'd get the laptops out and have them do typing practice. It was clearly more useful. I may or may not have overlooked some other archaic bollocks so that I had time to teach them coding.

We need personal finance classes so badly!!! This is why people are poor!!! I am a landlord in a rural county with only 10,000 people. Houses are very cheap here, sometimes 5 digits! I see applications with people's financial info and everything else - most do not have the slightest idea how money works. They make good money, but they're still poor. They will never be able to buy a home, they will always be renting from me. That cost twice as much as owning a house. I just had to explain to a guy what a credit score is! And they have no idea what "budget" means. Some have to pay biweekly instead of monthly, same price, but they cannot figure out how to save their own cash. Yet they always seem to have a bigger TV than I do...

I got an extra $500 last week for doing a few easy odd jobs for people in my building. Glad there are people like Simon who pay people like me to do things pretty much anyone could learn to do. I could even do it around my full time office job.

My brother and his best friend both took Home economics. That's largely because all the girls were in that class and it was an easy A. They both had a great time and they actually learned a thing or two. I would have done the same, but my time-table was full of science, shop and P. E. And I washed my own laundry. It never would have occurred to me that anyone else should be trusted with that job. And, yes, I'm a guy. Edit: My first wife could and did burn water. I'm not exaggerating. She destroyed a lot of my cookware. Yes, mine, I bought it long before I married her. I first used a band saw when I was 11 in grade 7 as part of the shop classes I took before high school. My home shop was equipped with a table saw, a drill press, a bench grinder and a bench vice. We also had circular saws, jig saws, drills and a whole bunch of hand tools. I learned how to use them all by the time I was 7. It's amazing what a little kid can do when their father is a tradesman and spends a little time with his kids. The trouble starts when entitled kids that have not been taught right from wrong or how to pay attention get a hold of tools that can cause serious injury or death. Then they blame the school? Grow up! I feel Dave's pain. I was a programmer. Although I did manage to use visual Studio for a time, it was a whole lot harder than straight up coding. C, not Cplus or Cpluss pluss or visual C number, was one of the first computer languages I really liked. I had already learned basic, Fortran and Cobol before reaching university.

Wow! Where I live in Aus, when I went to secondary school everyone was taught home economics (cooking) and textiles (sewing), that was 30yrs ago. We use to cook our own lunches and in textiles we all made a PE bag and because our school trip at the end of the year was to the snow (we don't get snow where I live), I made a water proof jacket and pants to wear. I think my PE bag could still be at my parents place, I used it for many yrs after school for different things. The same was for Metal/Wood work, electronics, plastics, everyone was taught it, in the Later years at school you got to choose what you did.

I left school in 2003 and both HFE (Home Foot Economics) and DT (Design Technology) were mandatory for boys and girls for the first 2 years of secondary school. After that we had the option to continue with them if you wanted or to drop them. I dropped HFE but continued with DT which covered Resistant Materials (Metal and Wood working).

Dave is on fire! Totally agree with his take on programming. Most young engineers I work with have a hard time understanding how code actually does what it does leading to shotgunning problem solving wasting tons of time

I was homeschooled by my mom, then went on to earn a GPA of 3.9 in aircraft maintenance at 23. That was after I earned my private pilot license at 21. It probably helped that I could take apart and put an engine back together among other things and make it work at 15. By the time I was 17 I was taking seriously damaged small engines and getting them running again and reliable. Beyond that I learned to cook, build, garden, hunt, fish, manage a domicile, raise kids (I was second of 6), harvest firewood, fix vehicles, raise animals, run heavy machinery, etc. etc. I want to know how many publicly schooled kids learned all those basics by 18 (obviously the more advanced stuff was later)

i had to dissect, explore, and research this topic exhaustively for a university class. there are 2 broad approaches to education. they could be termed as "liberal" and "industrial". liberal teaches you the basics of everything from the pantheon of knowledge and from there in university you specialize. the 2nd method, industrial, just equips you to be a valuable part of the labor force (if the skills happen to still be relevant by the time you graduate). this obviously will get you a job but will limit you if you wish to pursue something different. these 2 broad methods are extremes and an education can fall in between, but usually leans towards one direction or the other.

My mother insisted that all of her children knew how to cook. Both girls and both boys had skills in those areas because she wanted us to survive and produce grandchildren. Since I am old enough to be Simon's father I was the odd duck in my college dorm. I also cleaned the hell out of the oven in ways that the other guys in the dorm had never considered as being possible, much less desirable.

I took Home Economics in the early 90s (US). The class was split 50/50 between girls and boys. We learned cooking, sewing, and accounting. It was a very useful class. Carpentry class (sometimes called woodshop) on the other hand had at most one girl, and usually none. These were both elective classes btw, so people chose the classes they took. I also took drafting, welding, accounting, and electrons. Electronics became my main elective and both it and accounting counted as a math credit. I don't know how school is now in the US but it was very choice based when I went, at least in middle and high school. By the start of 11th grade I wasn't even taking standard classes anymore, and I only had to go to class for half a day in my senior year (12th grade) for the electronics class.

We got our first computer in 1984. It was a 30 lb laptop with a 5" monitor. It was called a Commadore 64SX. I learn Basic, Cobol, Pascal, and Fortran.

We had woodwork in third grade. I don’t remember much of what we did but at the end of the year we could make whatever. A bunch made a knife, because that was really popular for some reason, but I didn’t know what to do. I asked my teacher and he showed me the metal work area. I have no idea why, but I decided to make a hammer. It wasn’t more than a metal pole as a handle and then a block of metal with a hole in it as the head. It have never been really put together and have just been collecting dust in a windowsill at my parents house

“Cut out the middle man-why eat vegetables when you can eat animals that have eaten vegetables?!” Lolwut?! I know it’s a joke but that’s literally putting a middle man, or animal, between you and the vegetables! A tasty, savory, blood-filled animal.

Here at the daycare my three year old grandson just started because he couldn’t even go unless he was potty trained. It’s a good thing he has been for a long time.

I took cooking and sewing back in '79. Lots of guys did. We also had plastics class, silkscreening class, and woodworking class. Every class was a mix of girls and boys. There was only one class that was exclusive to any gender, and that was something to do with girl anatomy -- I assumed they were teaching them about having periods and such.

Being taught shop safety, the use of tools and just general maintenance type stuff is just as important as learning how to cook, finance, and all of that.

Simon - Hey guys, I have a great PE Teacher joke Unknown Massive Stranger - I better warn you that I'm a PE teacher. Simon - OK Mate. I'll tell it slowly then

man in intermediate school (graddes 7-9) has mix of home ec and DT where every school term its either foods/culinary, sewing, technology and carpentry that was for everyone. culinary was also an elective in senior high (gradess 10-12), same with carpentry, welding, automotive, aerospace and even co-op which was basically an on the job training/internship

I went to a technical school in the 70s. We had subjects like Secretarial Studies, Home Economics (aka cooking), and sewing classes. They were aimed more to the girls but there was not a lot to stop the boys from choosing those subjects. Not as sexist as one might imagine. Most of my cooking skills were learned at home, but Home Ec was fine for a year. I did a term of Secretarial Studies' (anything to avoid the trade subjects!) and could type around 50 words a minute. There were lots of girls doing trade subjects. Heck, my sister was better at woodwork and sheetmetal than I was. Science, humanities, and art were my subjects.

My children learned to cook at home, all of them from the age of 8 learnt how to make biscuits and the such like for the lunchboxes during the week and from 13 had to make one dinner per week. They can make everything from scratch, it's not hard, just takes planning, just like when I make the meals. My son makes amazing sauces, he can cook a rue that's just sublime, they will add lentils to stretch meals, they can all make casseroles and cook steak. I am raising people to manage their own lives, food is essential to this. This also means they have all done grocery shopping so know how much food costs and how to budget the weekly grocery list, how to manage the tighter weeks when every god damn bill in the world turns up and lightning strikes take out most electrical equipment on the property so there drains the bank account. They all can clean the house, including the toilet, wash and hang out washing, fold it ... being a working mum means you have to share the load. If your child cannot do these things, its not the school that's failing them.

Lol we had home ec to learn cooking, sewing, how to fill out a job application and balance a checkbook. We also took woodshop - or just “shop”. Definitely has all come in handy. I sew as a hobby, and still remember how to use most of the tools we learned on in shop.

When I was in high school in the US, back in the early 1990’s, I to Home Wreck and small gas engines/shop. I was lucky in the small gas engines class because the next year they scrapped the class, along with metal shop and wood shop the next year. That sucked because I really wanted to take metal shop. They condensed all of this, including Home Wreck class into a city wide/all school districts combined into the Skill Center, an off campus school where students learned the basics of a trade.

In my US school in the 1980's, Home Economics was required for boys and girls. Home finance was covered in math though- HomeEc focused on cooking and sewing. We alternated terms in Home Ec and Industrial Arts (woodworking, metal working, etc).

Home economics... We didn't actually have that class when I went to school in the 1995-2000 period, but we did have a class called, something along the lines of... domestic sciences. It was in the "Technology" slot, where once a week for a double period (2 hours) you do one of the "Technology" classes, and which Technology you learn changes every half term, giving you 6 different technologies throughout the year. So in this approximately 6 week slot (which could be only 5, or up to 7 depending which term you were in), what did we do in the food science class? 5 weeks of writing about hygiene, followed by 1 week of cooking a specific random recipe chosen by the teacher. That's how I learned to make Jam! I of course did this class 3 times before choosing something called "Systems and Control", which was the Electronics and computer control one, but the only other thing I remember cooking was a quiche. The other 5 options were... Woodwork, Graphic design (Everything from learning how to draw architecture to designing posters), Resistant Materials (Plastic and Metalwork), and Systems and control (Computers and Electronics), and Textiles. For GCSE, Woodwork was folded into Resistant Materials, so there were only 5 options. Both Boys and Girls did all 6 of these. When it came time to choose our GCSEs, we received Recommendations. You had to pick just 1 of the Technologies. I received a Recommendation for everything except Domestic Science. I would have loved to do all 4 of the ones I was recommended, but the way the school timetable system works, they were all happening at the same time. Yes, I was recommended to do Textiles for GCSE, I could have become a Tailor.

There are 10 Types of People in the World; Those Who Understand Binary, and Those Who Don't.

I was in middle school in the late 70’s. Everyone in my class took both home ec & woodshop. The idea was basic life skills for both girls and boys. You could take additional classes in food preparation or move on to auto shop if desired.

Programmer here. If you work at a company, putting (abstract) blocks together is actually your job, not actual coding. In fact, in most places, if you don't combine the current most famous set of framework and libraries and use their predetermined script that will yield the same proven thing as any other major corporate website/software, you put your job at risk. That is unless you do something with science or work in a company R&D team, you do not actually need to code.

I love when Simon has a keeps ad, it just always makes me chuckle.

When my kids started school they were really excited. Within a week they were just depressed. Apparently some of the kids didn't even know how to hold a pencil, and as my son put it, they were as dumb as a bag of hair. They couldn't read, write or perform basic math. Some didn't even recognize their own written names. My daughter thought she was being punished having to sit in class with those dullards. I seriously considered homeschooling, but they needed to socialize, so we saw school as a social activity and education as something we did at home.

18:30 100% with Dave on that one. If putting together pre-made bits of code made you a programmer, than IKEA made me a carpenter 🤷‍♂ And in such cases, I would say that a basic knowledge of how things are actually done if someone was to do them by hand would be absolutely useless in real life except for one BIG thing: You'd know what goes into those things, and you'd get a different sense of appreciation. Just like no one who ever had to do their laundry by hand would use the now popular "I want AI to do my laundry, not my art" comparison because they would know that they'd probably just wear their clothes until they couldn't stand the stench and then buy new ones on Amazon, if it wasn't for the washing machine.

Simon gives the only sensible answer against home school: “It’s a lot of work”

I took Home Ec in public school, 7&8 grade (either not both, you could take it either year), but it was 99% a cooking class. Boys and girls both required to take the class. I also took metal shop and wood shop, and there were girls in that class, though those classes weren’t mandatory. Actual home ECONOMICS course would have been extremely helpful, instead of just winging it for the first so many years of adulthood. As for credit cards - that’s easy. Only buy what you can afford. Pay the card off in full each month. Collect the rewards for using the card. Look at your bank balance, subtract your credit card balance, and that’s how much money you have left. Carry a credit card balance in an emergency only, like car repairs, then work to pay it off asap.

Same age as Simon but surprisingly in my small regional town Catholic school had a term each of cooking, sewing, woodwork and then computers each year from secondary school, with a bit of 'programming', then engineering and technology slants within all aspects. Both boys and girls were expected to learn it all. Funnily enough our cooking classes were pretty shite lol. I do recall learning about the food pyramid (which we now know is BS lol) and kilojoules etc.

4:40 yessssssss I loved home economics. I learned to cook. Learned to sew. It was great!

When I was at senior school for the first 3 years BOTH girls and boys rotated through ALL the subjects from making cakes or scrambled eggs, to sewing a pillow case right through to metal work making a small garden fork, to woodwork making games. NON of it was gender specific and BUG SURPRISE this was during the 70's and 80's, as I'm 56 now and was very happy to use the supposed, 'boys toys' of lathers, drills and welders. 😂

Home economics in the US involved personal and household finance. We learned how to balance a checkbook and even a basic primer on things like treasury bills and bonds (and the difference between stocks, bonds, CDs, and mutual funds). That was 7th and 8th grade of an AP middle school, circa 1986/87. I'm older than you two so I learned basic, PASCAL, and COBOL before Geocities and Angelfire got me into HTML and stylesheets. Oh and Dave can ingest a bag of Richards. I started on cello and moved to bass then to piano, guitar, and steel drums (and a little bit of harp) but bass is still my favorite instrument. And unlike the stereotype, I can read (and write) music (no tablature needed). As can most bass players I know. 😝

It does matter where the school is. My son goes to a rural school and he had personal finance for the first time in middle school. In high school there is home economics with a bakery open to the public, wood working, welding and even a class where they build a tiny home. I think it is assumed that not everyone is going to go to college so they try to have them ready for a trade coming out of school.

Home ec. was the only class I enjoyed in middle school. We learned everything from how to balance a bank account to cleaning carpeting. Yes, it was that detailed. We learned to cook, clean, run a household, and care for children. Taking home ec out of schools was a serious loss to the education system.

When I was in school, me and a couple of friends started reading up about minimal amounts of quantum physics (the more you know about it, the less you understand), and immediately got introduced to plasma - the MOST abundant form of matter in the entire universe, and until any of us got to later stages of college, there was barely a mention of it during our school years! I focused more on material sciences, and my best friend is currently a physicist working with high-powered lasers, with a doctorate in mathematics concerning gravitational bodies, and we both have a deep love of science to this day - we are MASSIVE nerds, and one day, would love to figure out how to create a lattice structure of titanium around my bones in such a way to not blah blah blah - THE POINT, is we still have to call our mum about how those hieroglyphics work on the washing machine 😥 (PS. We can cook food pretty F-ing well though, everyone should know how to cook - it's basic chemistry)