Question
If you had to pick one, what is the single most important subject everyone should know, beyond "core" subjects taught in the early years? Please don't answer with "core" subjects like reading, writing, basic math, science, and history.
Answer
The answers by Mark Eichenlaub, Walter Plinge, Fred Landis and User-13209674370931937457 contain interesting proposals (data, philosophy of science, current affairs, economics) but all suffer the problem of being advanced subjects that can only be taught above age 12 or so.
By that age, the battle has already been lost.
To really have an impact, you need new subjects at the 3 R's level (reading, writing, 'rithmetic).
There is really only one candidate here: programming. Experiments with kid-oriented languages like LOGO (programming language) show that really young children can actually develop strong programming intuitions around complex problems.
This is important for a LOT of reasons. Our world is now increasingly an "eaten by software" world, where the complexity of the innards is being hidden beneath layers of glossy UIs and adult-complexity software. Kids are growing up treating technology like nature -- stuff that just works, and can be taken for granted.
This is dangerous. To avoid a high-risk dependence on a Morlock class of people who can actually get into the innards of software, with the size of the class shrinking every generation, we need to democratize under-the-hood thinking skills around technology.
At an elementary level, this means turning kids into much more visual-tactile learners. I'd even suggest that the original 3 R's need to be reframed around learning computing somehow.
Stuff like learning about data and visualization (inherent in computing), internalizing falsifiability philosophy (via trial and error in computing), current affairs (learning to navigate an increasingly digitized maze of information and economics (selling $0.99 songs at age 5 on iTunes instead of lemonade) can all come later.
Computing literacy is a primary and crucial need. It's a survival skill that's soon going to be more important than even basic literacy (I am betting a lot of computing is going to go purely iconic/pictographic soon, short-circuiting even reading/writing skills... my 6 year-old nephew is learning complex non-verbal, non-quant skills on Angry Birds while still feeling his way around reading/writing).
By that age, the battle has already been lost.
To really have an impact, you need new subjects at the 3 R's level (reading, writing, 'rithmetic).
There is really only one candidate here: programming. Experiments with kid-oriented languages like LOGO (programming language) show that really young children can actually develop strong programming intuitions around complex problems.
This is important for a LOT of reasons. Our world is now increasingly an "eaten by software" world, where the complexity of the innards is being hidden beneath layers of glossy UIs and adult-complexity software. Kids are growing up treating technology like nature -- stuff that just works, and can be taken for granted.
This is dangerous. To avoid a high-risk dependence on a Morlock class of people who can actually get into the innards of software, with the size of the class shrinking every generation, we need to democratize under-the-hood thinking skills around technology.
At an elementary level, this means turning kids into much more visual-tactile learners. I'd even suggest that the original 3 R's need to be reframed around learning computing somehow.
Stuff like learning about data and visualization (inherent in computing), internalizing falsifiability philosophy (via trial and error in computing), current affairs (learning to navigate an increasingly digitized maze of information and economics (selling $0.99 songs at age 5 on iTunes instead of lemonade) can all come later.
Computing literacy is a primary and crucial need. It's a survival skill that's soon going to be more important than even basic literacy (I am betting a lot of computing is going to go purely iconic/pictographic soon, short-circuiting even reading/writing skills... my 6 year-old nephew is learning complex non-verbal, non-quant skills on Angry Birds while still feeling his way around reading/writing).