While I understand people getting mad in this thread - parents are falling down on the job. It's very difficult for society, in general to pick up all the slack, including the slack parents of these kids create by being oblivious AF. These are observation I've made of my own children and their peers and it was so alarming to me as a parent, I was more than happy to intercept it no matter who the kid was.
Do I think middle and high schoolers should be learning about basic life skills? Banking, budgeting, non-delusional sex ed, skills needed for the working world, the value of education and intelligence and critical thinking...yes. Should schools be teaching these things? Yes. In tandem with parents. And if you are an idiot that thinks - we shouldn't interfere/parents should be able to teach children bullshit with impunity/TAXPAYERS!! MY MONEY!! just shut the fuck up because you are also contributing to the problem and continuing to enforce the fact that America does not care about it's people, including it's children.
And I'm going to make this clear. I have seen several millennials on this forum ask questions that should have been answered by parents. The reason is almost always - my parents didn't teach me this. So stop getting mad at me or anyone identifying the problem. It isn't your fault but holding parents accountable for kids unable to cope with the world is something everyone should be doing. Including you.
I'm a Millennial. I don't give a rat's ass that my parents never taught me, because that is precisely what caused me to learn.
As a concession, I knew people in college who were previously home-schooled, and they had zero people skills, didn't know where Russia was on a map and had been taught obscure languages like Akkadian over practical languages like Spanish and French. It's totally on their parents that they were unprepared for the real world much less college. I always felt bad for those people. This kind of ignorance is fucked-up and wrong.
At the same time, my parents were emotionally absent and often physically absent. No one was around to help me with my homework, or give any sort of damn. I learned that I had to figure things out of my own - not just how to do my homework, but how to advocate for myself, how to seek out appropriate information, how to apply for college, how to apply for a job, how to invest in stocks, how to hire a lawyer when he was needed and what my rights were, etc. I wouldn't give any of that up. My parents didn't teach me shit, and honestly, I think that's great. "I hear and I forget, I see and I remember, I do and I understand." I made terrible mistakes, but I was way ahead of my peers early in college in terms of job applications, the stock market and grades. Every time I hear some young adult say that it was his or her parent's fault (which is happening with increasing frequency in my world at least), I just know I never want to invest in any way in that person because they are likely not to accept responsibility for much, and because they likely lack resourcefulness. "But, but, but...!" The subtler alternative to that is, "But I was never told/never learned/can't think out of the box, etc." One reason why I hire only Gen X or older.
Yeah, there are some conservatives who don't want to spend a penny on education. Then there are others who more specifically think that children are overprotected to the point that they are rightfully viewed as characteristically unqualified and that's why they don't deserve taxpayer money. Maybe people should stop coddling their children and thinking that taxpayers owe their children when they are too soft to find jobs.