Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/01/28/college-course-on-adulting.html
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Before anyone starts bashing Millennials or younger, I’ll just mention that I’ve met people in their 40s and 50s who could still use this course.
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I’m currently working on Un-Adulting, and it’s going fantastic.
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Isn’t this what home economics classes were all about in high schools. When I was in high school (early 90s), they were already on their way out in favour of stronger academics, but I do think we all missed out.
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Friendly reminder that Millennials aren’t in college anymore. Gen Z is the folks in college now.
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And most of Gen Z’s parents are Gen Xers.
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Friendly reminder that generational labels/cutoff dates are mostly arbitrary and largely meaningless.
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I could make a list of recommendations to fill a classroom for the semester. And they’re all over 30. Some will have to be hauled in strapped down like Hannibal Lecter, tags and registration still expired.
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The home ec courses available when I was in school were either sewing or cooking; there were no courses dealing with budgeting, reading a contract (either rental or EULA), minor home repairs, or other useful things for a person just heading out on their own. It was a rare male who took either a sewing or cooking course, even though frying an egg without burning it or sewing on a button are useful to all genders.
eta: I remember being given an assignment in civics/history class where I had X amount monthly, and I had to figure out how to stretch it to pay for rent, food, utilities, transportation, and 10% savings. Turns out it was a Kobyashi Maru; the amount we got wasn’t enough to cover all the bases. I guess the goal was to convince us it was a good idea to pursue higher education and jobs that paid better than minimum wage.
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Yeah, I almost added that, too.
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A lot of contracts these days are unreadable 800 page adhesion contracts you can’t alter anyway.
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Seriously though, this isn’t a bad idea. Granted parents should be teaching these things to their kids before they leave the nest, but that passage of guidance largely broke down somewhere over the past forty or fifty years and needs to be rebooted. Probably a good idea to start this kind of material in secondary school as @MadLibrarian suggests, though I don’t recall home economics ever quite covered the gamut that a course like this one is attempting.
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I think this is a great idea. My daughter gets this in her high school, but lots of schools do not do this, nor do most parents spend much time on it.
Roger that!
I have to regularly remind myself that most of my students have parents that are around my age…
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I dont think it was a class per se, but I seem to remember something like “Freshman orientation”. Is that not a thing anymore?
Lucky for me I had plenty of chores growing up, so I knew how to do a lot of stuff already.
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Conversely, there were a lot of skills once commonly taught in shop class that would clearly be just as useful for women even though the classes were mostly targeted toward young men.
If this country ever gets back to emphasizing hand skills in education I hope they don’t make dumb sexist distinctions between teaching someone how to use a sewing machine and teaching them how to use a power saw.
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Article:
Comments: “Don’t bash Millennials!”
Oh sure. But I’ll bash them for coming up with such an obnoxiously cutesy word as “adulting”. (And for the record, I am, apparently, a Millennial.)
Seriously though, the kind of things mentioned in the article (how to budget, how to manage stress, how to sleep better, etc.) - are those seriously things that kids are supposed to be taught by their parents, as opposed to learning the basics in school and figuring the rest out based on individual situations and needs, with advice from family, friends, peers, etc.? I was never taught how to budget by my mom (and man, am I better off for it), I figured it out as I went on with my life. She did give useful advice when I asked, but we never had a “come young tigerberry, let’s talk about how to do your finances when you’re an adult” moment.
This course doesn’t seem like it’s teaching something kids should already know. It looks like it’s for kids who used to rely too much on their parents before moving away and now don’t know how to deal with being self-reliant, kids who feel alone and lost in a new environment without family they got used to relying on being close, or kids who are just intimidated by being “on their own” and need a support group of peers to learn from and share advice with. I think it’s a fairly good idea, that a lot of people could use.
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By this point I suspect there’s a lot of parents of college students who struggle with adulting. Rather than blaming “boomers” as seems so in vogue, I prefer to focus on the fact that certain skills just weren’t reliably transferred and there’s a benefit to both individuals and society to teach them so hopefully they can renter the knowledge passed on.
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Yeah, why can’t we call it “adultery”?
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