Our public schools should be teaching every child how to grow food in a garden.  They should be teaching every student how to change a flat tire, how to cook their own food, how to make change, how to balance their checkbook.  Comment yes if you agree.  Like and share.

Yeah, no.

While those are all admirable things for people to know how to do, they are also things that any adult can figure out and anyone with access to the internet or a library can find instructions for.  And that’s what we need to be teaching.

There is so much knowledge in the world; and new information, new discoveries, new important things to learn are being created every day.  This is the information age, and we are awash in things that it would be good to know.  But we don’t all need to know exactly the same things and we don’t all need to know them at the same time in our lives.

The biggest impediment to quality education for everyone is the belief that there are certain things, particular narrow ideas or “life skills,” that everyone needs to know.  What everyone really needs to know is how to think and reason effectively; how to ask effective and relevant questions; how to find relevant, valid, useful and credible answers; and how to apply those answers to the specific problems they need to solve or specific tasks they need to accomplish.

All the rest is optional.  Teach some of it so that students can see how to use the thinking skills they are learning, but focus on the thinking itself, not the specific tasks.

Teach students how to read well and nothing they need to know will be unavailable to them.

Teach them how to use numbers effectively and keeping track of their own money will never have to be a problem.

Teach them to think scientifically and they will be able to tell the difference between what they know, what they think they know, what they don’t actually know, and what they believe.  And they will understand the proper role of each in their lives.

Teach them how to think historically and they will be able to see how their own story intersects with the stories history tells us; and they will be able to use those stories to help make the world a better place.

Teach them to think and express themselves creatively and they will never lack for beauty or inspiration of their own, or for appreciation of the beauty and inspiration of others.

Teach them to express their ideas articulately and eloquently in speech and in writing and they will always have a voice that cannot be silenced.

Teach them to argue rationally and with civility and they will not need to follow demagogues or charlatans.

Teach them to think ethically and responsibly and they will become the leaders of a world with the potential for honest, compassionate and peaceable coexistence.

Teach them to listen effectively and the world will be open to them.

That does not, of course, mean that we might not choose to teach some “practical” skills.  But product should always be the servant of process, not the other way around.  If we teach students to garden it should be in the service of teaching them about other things.  A garden is, after all, more than just a collection of vegetation sitting in dirt.  There are reasons in science for why some plants need one kind of soil and others need something different.  There is a science to understanding why some plants should be paired with other plants, but avoid being too close to others.

There is much we can learn about gardens from the history of agriculture, from folklore and literature, from the politics of our relationship to the earth and its ecosystems.  There are ways to make a garden beautiful as well as productive, and to use what we grow to make aesthetically pleasing food served in beautiful surroundings.

In the skill of changing a tire there is much to be learned about applied physics, about risk assessment, about relationships between humans and their machines.

In balancing a checkbook, there is the application of mathematics, understanding of money and wealth as sources of power for both good and ill.  There is a chance for self-awareness in seeing how each of us thinks about money and possessions in our lives.  There are ethical questions that can be asked and answered.

All of these things are possible, but there are also a nearly infinite number of other ways to teach the same things, and we should be open to them all.

There is an old saying that if you give someone a fish you feed them for a day; if you teach them how to fish you feed them for a life time.  But fish is a very limited diet.  So, if instead, you use fishing as a way to teach them about a great deal more than that, then you will not only feed their stomach for a lifetime, you will feed their whole body, their mind, and their spirit.