Professional Documents
Culture Documents
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1
Skills such as cookery, dressmaking and woodwork should not be taught at school as it is
better to learn these from family and friends. To what extent do you agree or disagree?
It is true that many people believe that schools should only teach academic subjects and
prepare students for formal exams. I disagree completely with this view, and I would
argue that teaching practical life skills is essential.
Secondly, while children need to acquire practical skills, there may be no family or
friends to help them. Consider, for example, single-parent households, with no father to
teach DIY
skills, or households in which working mothers have no time to teach children to cook or
sew. There are, too, many dysfunctional families in which, for whatever reasons, parental
involvement in bringing up their offspring is almost completely absent. Yet children need
to learn these domestic skills, and the only place for many of them to do this is in school.
Otherwise, when they enter adult life, they will rely on expensive ready meals or on
buying new clothes and furniture when all that is needed is
a simple repair.