Did I hallucinate this course?

June 6, 2018 5:04 PM

I remember taking a course in California called, "Personal Social Living", which was a high school graduation requirement. The topics included financial literacy, child development, sex education, and a host of other topics related to being an adult. Have you taken a similar course? Is this type of course offered still?

What brings this question about is the wider discussion of financial literacy among students and the larger population. At the time, I thought the course was a waste of a valuable time slot that I could devote to an elective, but in retrospect, it was highly valuable. Also, a source of fond memories like the STD presentation that was done as a musical. Anyway, here are my questions:

• Did you take a similar course?
• Is this type of course still offered?
• In a related manner, how is financial literacy taught to children/teenagers in your area?

If you can find links to textbooks, that would be fab, too.

posted by jadepearl to Education (28 answers total)

In Illinois I the 90s I had to take Home Ec as an 8th grader (covered nutrition, child development, etc. ) in HS I had to take Consumer Education (covered personal finance) and Health (covered lots of things, including reproductive health) as required classes. I also had to pass a test on the US constitution and the State constitution.

(Of course, I still see people I went to school with posting memes on Facebook about "why didn't they teach us how to balance a checkbook or cook a meal or other stuff I needed to know instead of the quadratic formula!?" Like.... They did. I was sitting right next to you. Paying attention.)
posted by Green Eyed Monster at 5:44 PM on June 6, 2018 [9 favorites]

In my California district this class is called "Living Skills". It's been a while (mid-1990s) since I took the class but I remember it primarily focusing on public health issues like STD prevention and substance abuse. There was also some light coverage of topics like stress management, race/sex discrimination, and maybe abusive relationships. I don't think there was a child development component. I definitely do not recall any coverage of financial literacy or similar "adulting" topics like household management, job searches, etc. There was no textbook for the course.

As of 2013 it looks like the class is still being offered as Living Skills but now includes coverage of money management and family development.
posted by 4rtemis at 5:54 PM on June 6, 2018

Wondering if this is a public school thing in addition to the generational thing? In my (California) private high school in the 90s, the closest this came to was a mandatory personal health/sex ed elective freshman year that met once a week. No financial literacy course, no home ec; for the former, it was expected your family would teach you what you needed to know, and for the latter, a similar concept, though for a fair number of those families, it was a class expectation that you likely wouldn't need to know it because of course you would have enough money to pay for somebody else to take care of those things for you.
posted by Pandora Kouti at 6:10 PM on June 6, 2018

One component of my high school economics class was doing income taxes. They would give us blank tax forms (the ones you fill out) and then hypothetical tax forms (the ones you get from your employer the bank etc.) and we had to do the taxes for these made-up people.

There were parenting courses that covered child development. I didn't take it so I don't know the details.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 6:16 PM on June 6, 2018

I was coming to say Illinois had a (state-wide) consumer ed requirement when I was in high school (graduated in 2004). You could meet the requirement by taking a test that was offered once a year or so, or by taking one of a few classes. There was a sort of basic life skills class (that may have been called Consumer Ed) that was quite popular, but I met the requirement with AP Econ. I learned how to write a check in first grade (and maybe balance a checkbook), but that was it.

My junior high offered home ec, but it was not required and I didn't take it because my elective was orchestra. Among the kids not doing music, it was probably the most popular elective.

We had fairly high quality health classes in junior high (with pretty decent sex ed). High school health class was required (one semester of freshman year), but was not very good. Illinois also required gym.

It was a requirement at my high school (and I was told it was a state requirement) that you pass the classroom portion of driver's ed. You could take driver's ed privately if you wished and you weren't actually obliged to learn to drive.
posted by hoyland at 6:18 PM on June 6, 2018 [1 favorite]

I take that back... there was some "make a household budget" activity in AP Econ that was probably inserted so it could count for the Consumer Ed requirement.
posted by hoyland at 6:19 PM on June 6, 2018

California, 90’s, life skills. We had to pick a job out of the classifieds with a pay scale and then make a budget to live on based on the salary. We weren’t allowed to make up numbers, we did a class on what food costs and found apartments from the same paper. It was illuminating.

However only the wealthy high school I went to had this class, the second one I went to didn’t offer it.
posted by lepus at 6:20 PM on June 6, 2018

I definitely took a class like that (Ontario, Canada, early 1990s), though I can't remember what is was called. Something Living, maybe? It was kind of an odd name. It wasn't avery popular class, most students at my high school had never heard of it. I think I was encouraged to take it because the administration had me pegged for a dropout.
posted by rodlymight at 6:37 PM on June 6, 2018

Graduated from LAUSD in 2003. That requirement seemed to be added during my senior year, and I was still forced into it in my last semester. I may have been the only senior in the class - the rest were mostly freshmen I didn't know. It was called "Life Skills" at my school, and included personal and cashier math, resumes and job interviews, light business writing (letters, maybe?). It was taught by a coach I didn't know.

We had no textbook, and watched multiple movies that were only very vaguely tied to the class's topics.

Come to think of it, I have no idea if my younger siblings had to take a similar class at their respective high schools, also in LAUSD.
posted by WasabiFlux at 6:39 PM on June 6, 2018

My kid is a middle-schooler at LAUSD - in 5th grade, they had an assignment where they had to choose careers, wardrobes, vehicles, and housing and research the various costs associated with them.
posted by mogget at 7:11 PM on June 6, 2018

In Alberta today, as it was in the 1990s when I took it, the course is a half course (3 hours per week IIRC). It's called CALM (Career and Life Management) and it combines a little bit of sex ed, a little bit of more standard health class (say no to drugs, eat a balanced diet, parenting etc), more generic personality/leadership stuff and a slice of financial education. Here's the content, in PDF form. Maybe 10-12 hours of that total, from applying for jobs and resumes to budgeting to whatever else.

It's mandatory for high school graduation, taught primarily at the grade 11 level and I'm happy to see that the kids today think it's just as trite as I did back in the day. It's problematic, since it's not something I think most high school teachers or students have a real passion for so nobody cares, since it's very lowest-common denominator and everybody has very different needs (for instance, the sex ed stuff was years too late for some of my classmates and *ahem* decades too early for others; the sorts of career skills a kid who's going to work in a warehouse is different from one who's going to law school).

It's sort of ridiculous to think that you can teach adulting in 60 hours (and that you'd want to trust a 16 year old with learning it); the only thing more ridiculous would be not even trying.
posted by Homeboy Trouble at 7:15 PM on June 6, 2018 [2 favorites]

Graduated high school in Southern California (not LA County) in 1988. We had no such life skills course graduation requirement (although Driver's Ed was required, which I was quite bitter about). So it was new after that.
posted by crush at 7:30 PM on June 6, 2018

In my NC public school in the late 90s, there definitely wasn't any sex ed (state would take away funding if anyone tried it! I hear it's different now), but there was an elective called Consumer Math. Unfortunately, it was seen almost as a remedial math class and wasn't desirable to many students. I ended up taking it because I didn't want to fulfill my last math credit requirement with calculus, and I AM SO GLAD. We covered making a budget, balancing checkbooks (those were still a thing), and even understanding loan interest and completing tax returns. I wish it were a mandatory course for everyone, across the country.

As a sexuality educator in the SF Bay Area in the early 2010s, I was a guest lecturer in a few highschool life skills classes. Of course my focus was making healthy choices, body image, and STI prevention, so I'm not sure what else was covered in the class when I wasn't there.
posted by rhiannonstone at 7:34 PM on June 6, 2018

When I went to high school in New York (Suffolk) around the turn of the century we had all of this stuff:
2 years of actual health class including complete sex ed in middle school (as well as again in biology and AP biology)
home ec in middle school (how to use an oven and follow a recipe)
Participation in Government (how to vote, how to understand the news, very valuable to me now!)

I took an elective on childhood development and my social studies teacher in 9th grade folded stuff into the curriculum about budgeting and being an aware consumer. I guess you could do that back then.
posted by bleep at 7:59 PM on June 6, 2018

I had exactly that class and it was called Family Life.
San Diego, late 70’s.
posted by SLC Mom at 9:11 PM on June 6, 2018

Same as SLC Mom: Family Life. It was middle school in San Diego County, early 80s. Nothing that I recall in high school, though there was a required health class for all (I think) college freshmen in California. Might have been two semesters, might have been called Health 101. Definitely had a nutrition and field component, including in the late 80s the “Rockport Walking Method.” I always wished I’d had a life skills class of some kind in high school. Closest I got was an auto shop elective. I remember being pretty freaked out freshman year of college, still living at home and wondering how people learn about leases and apartments and insurance and such. Huh. That fear could very well be the reason I ended up renting rooms in other people’s houses for the next five years!
posted by AnOrigamiLife at 10:23 PM on June 6, 2018

High-performing (100% college-bound) suburban Buffalo school in the late 70s and early 80s:

In fourth grade, we were taught, as part of a Social Studies unit, how to write out a check, how to keep a check register and balance it, how to fill out a deposit slip, and how to endorse a check. We were not taught about credit cards or interest rates.

As part of a semester of 8th grade health, and again in 11th grade health, we had sex education. The former was primarily biology; the latter was primarily the different types of birth control and the development of the fetus. There was an acknowledgment of homosexuality existing (much the way in bio only blonde and brunette were discussed, but there was an "oh, yeah, there are redheads" but no more). STDs (but not HIV) were briefly covered.

I recall a Home Ec elective where infant and childcare seem to have been covered, but my electives were French and typing. A Social Studies elective for seniors was Econ, but we were all in AP European History senior year, so we missed it. Allegedly, there was a great deal of discussion of applying for mortgages and car loans, making up budgets, etc. The Regents-level kids had lots of opportunities to take business (DECA) and financial literacy classes; the honors/AP kids really had no chance to take anything of the sort.

10 years after I graduated from high school, the Jump$tart Coalition was started for just this purpose, to teach financial literacy. It's very cool.
posted by The Wrong Kind of Cheese at 10:23 PM on June 6, 2018

Rural western New York. Nothing like what you describe. There was a personal finance unit in our required Economics class, and sex ed in our required Health class, but that was it.

ETA: Both classes were one-semester
posted by The Underpants Monster at 12:33 AM on June 7, 2018

No such class at my public high school in Southern California, late 90s. We did have to take sex ed, US government, and econ (one semester each) to graduate. Home ec (cooking, baking, sewing) was an elective that I didn't take.

In 9th grade sex ed, I think there was an assumption that students had taken the year-long 7th grade health class in the same school district. I remember it expanding on topics from the earlier class. Along with the standard STD photos and condom-on-banana demonstration, we had to carry a 10lb flour "baby" everywhere for a week.

The "personal finance" portion of the econ class had us pretending to invest in the stock market. To this day, it remains outside my realm of practical life skills and I wish we'd looked at tax forms instead!
posted by kiripin at 12:46 AM on June 7, 2018

Life Skills was a graduation requirement when I went through LAUSD (class of 2011). It looks like they stopped requiring it in 2014, and the equally useless "Applied Technology" class also now seems to have been phased out. I took them both, along with Health and P.E., in summer school. (I also have a memory of having to take a Child Psychology summer course that counted toward some other random requirement, but what that would be, I don't know.) They were pretty much pointless wastes of time. In theory, it would be great to make sure everyone got a Life Skills course, and a Tech course, and a second round of Health. In practice, the classes weren't part of existing departments, so random teachers took them on. The course quality, therefore, varied wildly.

Personally, my experience of Life Skills was being lectured at for hours by a woman who purported to be some kind of counselor, and who was intent on convincing us that we weren't going to get into college unless we took every available AP class, had 4.9 GPAs (except also, here's a horror story about some kid who supposedly had a 4.7 and didn't even get into, GASP, UC Riverside!!1), and studied our every waking hour. She also taught us not to prioritize work, ever, because "that's not how the real world works" and "it encourages procrastination." (Instead we were just supposed to magically do everything at once all the time, or something.) She also told us stories about the vacation she was missing to teach this class; assigned us a ten page paper due the next day, the subject of which was basically, "Why I Won't Get Into College"; and had us practice drawing up budgets (her main parameters of success being extreme frugality, and never getting into any kind of debt for any reason, because who needs credit I guess??).
posted by desert outpost at 12:54 AM on June 7, 2018

Oregon, early 90s, Personal Finance. Required semester-long course.

Our teacher had a set of forty different individual life situations, which were pretty diverse. Each student would pull one out of a hat, and then we had the choice: we could marry, remain single, live as an unmarried couple or even group (yep!), have kids + whichever number and associated budget. As the class progressed, he even thought to throw in life changes such as divorce, unplanned pregnancy, mortgage issues, death and such.

It covered pretty much everything: budgeting + credit/interest rates, home and car purchase, home rental, higher ed finances (loans etc.), writing checks, and since we worked as a class role-playing relationships, it also touched on communication around finances.

The older I get the more I realize how genius it was, and what care our prof had taken to give us tools that would really be useful.

It saved my financial life.
posted by fraula at 1:15 AM on June 7, 2018

She also taught us not to prioritize work, ever, because "that's not how the real world works" and "it encourages procrastination." (Instead we were just supposed to magically do everything at once all the time, or something.)

And then she moved to New York, went into academic publishing, and became my boss, or else there are two of them which I don't want to believe.

As far as cooking, in Grade 7 we had a choice of cooking or woodworking, and in Grade 8 we could choose between sewing and metal shop. My class had the distinction of being the first in that school's history in which students were not automatically assigned to one course or the other based on gender. I took woodworking and sewing, which have both been incredibly handy skills to have over the years.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 2:49 AM on June 7, 2018 [1 favorite]

1. Yes, I had basically that same course in central Indiana in the late 1980s (I graduated from hs in 1988).
2. I don't live there anymore so I don't know if it's offered at my old hs but it's certainly not offered in my area now, in the public schools or the private schools (part of my work now is actually knowing what courses are offered where, so I know this). Some of them separate stuff out but there's no single unifying course like the one we took.
3. Some schools have Financial Literacy classes. Mostly the private Catholic schools, but one or two of the larger public schools do, too. The secular private schools (the really expensive ones) don't offer it because they assume (probably rightly) that those kids are getting taught those things at home. There are non-profit organizations around town that will come into a school, typically an upper elementary or middle school, and teach financial literacy. Mostly, though, it isn't taught, and that's a problem. I think many people in charge of public schools want to believe that kids will get this kind of stuff at home but in my experience, that doesn't happen.
posted by cooker girl at 5:41 AM on June 7, 2018

Is this type of course still offered?

Yes, at least in some places - the modern term that I'm most familiar with is Family and Consumer Sciences. This supplanted "home ec." Sex ed is usually a separate class (called "Health" or similar), though.
posted by mosst at 6:28 AM on June 7, 2018

I graduated from a middle-middle class NJ public high school in 2003. There was a half year required class called someing along the lines of "family skills" that taught budgeting for groceries, had those crying dolls to take home, taught about opening bank account and how to write a check, etc.

However, you could get out of having to take this class by taking AP classes or band or choir which had scheduling conflicts with the class so essentially having to take the class became a class and intelligence marker in itself which was a bit unfortunate.
posted by WeekendJen at 8:44 AM on June 7, 2018

In British Columbia in the 90s we were required to take something called "Career and Personal Planning" every year from Grade 8 through 12 and it covered all of those topics. There are some resources from those years still online: Grades 11 & 12. A fun element of it was in Grade 8 where we were shown the Degrassi High episode where Spike gets pregnant and the one where one of the twins has an abortion as part of the program. Canada!

It now seems to be called Health and Career Education. Here is the Grades 8 & 9 curriculum and they also offer it for Kindergarten through Grade 7.

The stuff that I remember being taught in the 80s and 90s in elementary and high school is what my current province (Ontario) is still arguing over whether it is appropriate to be taught in schools (less on the sexual orientation and gender identity sides, mind you), so I guess it was progressive.
posted by urbanlenny at 10:55 AM on June 7, 2018

Vancouver, Canada before urbanlenny. I graduated in the late 80s. I had two sets of courses during high school. One was a home ec/shop combo where we rotated through woodworking, metal working, electronics, sewing and cooking. The other was called Life Skills and covered bank accounts, compound interest, balancing a chequebook and other practical/legal matters. Both classes have proved to be immensely helpful. Sex ed was mostly covered in biology class back then.

My kid is about to start high school in Quebec and as far as I know there's nothing similar.
posted by Cuke at 5:10 AM on June 8, 2018

The other was called Life Skills and covered bank accounts, compound interest, balancing a chequebook and other practical/legal matters.

Funny, the home ec, woodworking, etc class in BC in the 90s was called Life Skills (weird they switched the names) and was mandatory for Grade 8 as well.
posted by urbanlenny at 7:18 AM on June 8, 2018