Redesigning High School from Scratch

If you were redesigning high school education from scratch, what material would you include in the curriculum (assuming it’s a well funded high school), that is generally not taught in high schools today?

Some classes that I might want to include are:

Thrive: staying happy and healthy.

This could include: 

• Cognitive-behavioral therapy skills training (to help ward off depression and anxiety)
• Emotional control strategies from dialectical behavioral therapy
• Behavioral activation strategies for working around self-defeating behaviors
• Problem-solving skills applied in realistic simulations of difficult situations
• Mindfulness/meditation training
• Learning the most robust and useful psychological findings on human happiness and mental health
• Practice noticing, identifying, interpreting, expressing emotions, savoring, gratitude, self-compassion, assertiveness
• The most robust and useful findings related to staying physically healthy (including how to exercise well and safely)
• How to manage disappointment and recover from failure (including actually failing and dealing with it), learning to set expectations

Disagree: how to figure out the truth.

This could include:

• The rules of making valid and evidence-based arguments rather than using rhetoric
• Practice learning from the other side as well as helping the other side see the truth of your perspective
• Material involving logic, philosophical argument, rhetorical fallacies, researching the different sides on an issue and forming a synthesis

Learn: becoming your own teacher. 

This could include:

• Principles of learning new information 
• How to research efficiently and remember what you learn (with opportunities to apply these skills to learn challenging topics)
• After teaching themselves the subject, they would distill the material, and then teach the most critical parts to their classmates, (with teachers available to help when they get stuck during the learning process)

Communicate: creating and maintaining good relationships. 

This could include: 

• Social skills theory and practice with simulations
• Public speaking principles with opportunities to practice
• Psychological theories on good relationships 
• Basics of fashion theory
• How to start conversations 
• How to handle controversial conversation topics
• How to deal with feelings of social anxiety
• How to give compliments
• How to talk to someone who is upset
• How to express yourself effectively when you are upset
• How to be vulnerable
• How to mediate between others
• How to give actively constructive responses
• Practice in simulations considering another’s perspective
• Learning empathy and model other people and their needs
• Understanding the destructive social actions of others

Help: doing good for others. 

This could include:

• Moral philosophy (including utilitarianism, virtue ethics, and rights theory)
• Findings of experimental psychology, as demonstrated empirically, related to human morality
• Psychology of disgust
• Compassion meditation
• Discussions of the major controversial ethical topics and why one might fall on each side of them
• Altruistic assignments (e.g., students find ways to practice doing good both in and out of school)
• Famous experiments like the Milgram experiment and Jonathan Haidt’s ethics rationalization experiments
• Discussions on the effectiveness of doing good (e.g., the “happy coincidence” that doing good for others helps yourself)

Understand: why the world is the way it is.

This could include:

• Cosmology
• Evolutionary theory
• Tribal peoples
• Early history
• Industrial revolution
• Modern history
• Group Psychology
• Microeconomics
• Macroeconomics

Succeed: understanding and achieving your goals. 

This could include:

• An exploration of personal values and their bases 
• Effective goal setting
• Organizational skills
• Productivity techniques
• How to choose a career, 
• Components of success in practice (such as, consciousness, stick-with-it-ness, aiming at the right things, knowing what you want, getting help from others, meaning in work, desire for excellence, sense of self-efficacy) 
• Techniques for faster skill acquisition (such as always working at the edge of your ability and getting rapid feedback)
• Personal finance
• How to consciously design your environment for success

Live: important basic life skills. 

This could include:

• Healthy cooking
• Personal finance (e.g., investment, compounding, credit cards, interest, taxes, insurance, saving, and budgeting)
• Fixing common things that break
• Basic first aid and how to handle the most common medical problems

Decide: making good choices in an uncertain world.

This could include:

• Formulas for mean, median, standard deviation, and expected value
• Principles of good decision making and decision making biases
• The nature and function of beliefs (e.g., the idea that all beliefs have uncertainty, the idea that our own believing is merely evidence for something being true, the problem with all or nothing thinking, conditional expectation, correlation)
• Principles of probability (e.g., the many fallacies related to probabilities such as correlation not implying causation, opportunity cost, marginal thinking, Simpson’s paradox, rules of thumbs for making more accurate predictions, calibration training practice with both probabilities and confidence intervals, nudges, defaults, the paradox of choice, bayesian thinking applied to real-world examples of the sort that kids would care about and encounter regularly)
• Randomization
• Experiments
• The scientific method
• Practice developing hypotheses and testing them
• Working with basic data

Create: the joy of making new things. 

This could include:

• The students create meaningful things that they’ve envisioned while learning and consistently practicing the relevant skills to execute their ideas. 
• Essay writing
• Carpentry
• Robotics
• Fiction writing
• Prototyping
• Design
• Music
• Art (e.g., sculpture)
• Software
• Game making
• Theater/Performance
• Public speaking
• Film