Learning is the cornerstone of our lives. Most adults don’t realize that just about everything they do in their daily lives is based on what they learned as children.
While some skills we may learn from our parents and others in our personal lives, most are learned during our formative time in the school environment. After all, it’s where we spent most of our day as children. Our personal development was heavily influenced here by what we learned. It shaped our behavior, our personalities, and our ability to handle different scenarios as adults.
So if you don’t notice your lessons from elementary school in your actions today, here are the areas of your life where you might want to take a closer look.
Life Skills
The critical thinking and decision-making skills we learn early on in primary school are used in our adult lives in every aspect. As young children, we learn these skills throughout many different academic lessons, whether it’s choosing which answer we think is best on a multiple-choice test or figuring out which column of numbers we should multiply first in a double-digit math problem. This translates into adult life in everyday circumstances, such as deciding which driving route best to take or which jobs we should apply to.
Money Management
Every time you’re in a store purchasing something, you’re using skills that you most likely learned in school. In various math classes throughout primary and secondary school, we learn how to add, subtract, multiply, and divide amounts of money. We learn financial literacy this way. Roleplaying scenarios where students pretend that they’re in a market buying or selling things is a typical activity in math classes around the world.
Relationships and Family
Relationships require communication, cooperation, compromising, active listening, and conflict-resolution skills. Each one of these skills can be found in many typical classroom activities, such as games or projects that involve working with other classmates. We learn how to maintain healthy relationships by interacting with peers and by doing so under the care of teachers, who often model what behavior is appropriate during these interactions.
Raising Children
Many high school health classes require students to take care of robotic baby simulator dolls as part of a lesson on parenting. But this isn’t the only way that students learn how to take care of children. By the time most students reach high school and are assigned this class, they already have some necessary skills for this built-in from their primary school health class such as knowing what foods are nutritious and how to avoid getting hurt.
Making Friends
During breaks and playtime in school, children are interacting with many others that they normally wouldn’t be exposed to while at home. They learn how to make friends with other children who have different personalities and varying familial and cultural backgrounds. This is how many of us learned how to make friends and how to integrate within larger groups of friends. We also learned how to use these groups to branch out and make new friends from mutually existing friends.
Maintaining Health
We learn about health in many different ways in school. Both physical education (P.E.) and health classes are core classes in most grade-level schools. P.E. teaches us how to stay active and healthy with sports and exercise. Health class teaches us about eating healthy foods, weight management, safety, illness prevention, and first aid.
Doing Business
When a teacher encourages children to answer questions and commends them, this inspires motivation, initiative, and self-esteem. This type of character-building development takes place in all areas of academia. We learn leadership, collaboration, and communication skills during group tasks. Creativity is learned and inspired through activities such as art. Social studies lessons teach us about other cultures. All of this combines into the professional skill sets many of us will end up using in our adult careers.
Emotional Balance
Our emotions, while often affected by external factors, become more developed through learning. Although things in everyday life may affect our mood or feelings, we’re able to handle these changes better because of the emotional development we received early on. It’s teachers who are often the first to show students how to react to disappointment, how to control emotions, and how to think positively.
The Dream Oak
Learn, help family and friends, and help the planet!
