[christkv]

This I would love schools to teach critical thinking, how you country works, citizen rights and responsibilities, financial skills, how starting and running business work. All the plumbing that you have to deal with in the real life. However I don’t think schools are set up for this either in skills or willingness.

[msg3]

..or time. Schools in the UK have already got a curriculum that's pretty full. Everyone will have their own different list of "essential life skills" and trying to fit them all into the curriculum is impossible.

One thing that is often missing from these conversations is that arguably the goal of education isn't really to teach you any specific skill, but rather to give you the capability to learn things by yourself.

Part of this process will necessarily mean teaching you things like reading and writing, but whenever I hear "My school didn't teach me X, so I had to teach myself, wasn't my school terrible", I think "no, probably not."

[DaiPlusPlus]

FWIW, we covered critical thinking in lower-sixth (16-17yo) as my school offered it as an elective, and I did 2 years of critical media studies as part of my english-language GCSE (ages 14-16). Not every school will have offered those subjects to their student body though. Another factor is that I was in the top-sets which meant every course was available for me - if I were in a lower-ability set/group I would have had less opportunities for critical studies courses.

(Paternalism warning:) My main take-away from that experience was that the people that I feel would benefit the most from media-literacy and critical-thinking are the ones who wouldn't have been given an opportunity to study it at secondary-school in the first place...