ampattenden

ANNIE HSIAO-CHING WANG

- all the major world religions plus the indigenous one(s) and any others common in the area, all from an academic standpoint.

- all official languages, plus local indigenous and signed languages even if they’re not official.

- politics, from an academic standpoint. What actually is socialism? Communism? Nazism? Fascism? Capitalism?

- financial literacy, as its own subject as well as integrated into the math curriculum.

- basic law - local human rights, consumer law, renting, voting, disability law… the stuff everyone benefits from knowing. Also integrate with the financial literacy program

.- basic life skills. Cooking, sewing, fixing stuff, building basic stuff, growing food, basic programming and computer literacy, basic electronics, all compulsory and non-gendered.

- local indigenous history and mythology (acknowledging that you often can’t draw a line between those), including all the bits that make white people and other colonisers look bad.

- comprehensive sex ed with consent, minority genders and sexualities, and intersex identities integrated at every level.

- basic scientific literacy with an emphasis on finding stuff out for yourself. How to research stuff, how to fact check, how to spot logical fallacies, how and when to change your ideas about things. Should also be integrated into english (or equivalent) and social studies.

- project management. Let kids organise their field trips. Have a school market and let them organise stalls and sell stuff. Get them planning and teaching lessons. Assign leaders for group projects and make sure everyone leads at some point in the year.

- basic medical stuff. Anatomy, basic mechanics of common infections (bacteria vs viruses vs fungal infections etc), how to talk about health problems, how and when to seek help, how and when to get a second opinion, first aid, CPR and how/when to find and use a community defibrillator if those are available locally, info about local common problems and stigmatised illnesses, how to find out which specialist works with which conditions, disability rights, healthcare rights, and integrated with the sex ed curriculum.

- free time as a compulsory thing, with adult supervision and expertise and the school facilities and resources available.

- local environmental hazards and how to navigate them. Learning to swim, how to navigate the outdoor environment, sun safety, radiation safety, environmental toxicity, unexploded ordnance management, anything else applicable locally.

some cultural historians believe it also goes back further, to the middle ages, when large banquet-style meals were served on trestle tables that had no side support. if someone put their elbows on the table, they risked bringing the whole table down with them.

So, say I’m deciding whether to eat chicken at a restaurant. All evidence is that it’s a good idea. I’m hungry for chicken, and I usually feel good after eating it.

I eat the chicken, and I get food poisoning. The resulting illness causes me to fall short of responsibilities, and creates numerous problems for me and the people who depend on me.

What happened?

Trauma brain says: “This happened because I am Bad At Making Decisions. If I had made The Right Decision and not eaten chicken, everything would have been fine.”

Recovery brain says, “According to the information that was available to me, the chicken was unlikely to make me sick. Eating chicken was a Good Decision with Bad Consequences. This happened to me because I had incomplete information.”

The “trauma brain” response makes all decisions really hard, because each decision involves the prospect of being judged by a future self that has more information.

“Should I buy the $2 mouse pad or the $3 mouse pad? If I buy the cheaper one and it doesn’t work well, it will be my own fault for not buying a better quality one…”

(Then I might end up paying myself $1-per-hour to agonize over which mouse pad to buy, which is probably an ACTUAL unwise course of action.)

But if I foster the “recovery brain” response, I can start to trust that my future self will judge my decisions kindly.

“If I buy the cheap mouse pad and it doesn’t work, then I only gambled $2 on it. If I buy the $3 one and even it doesn’t work, then I’ll have more closely guessed how much I need to pay for a mousepad of sufficient quality.”

And then later when the mousepad doesn’t work: “Well, that didn’t work. At least I made a decision. The outcome has given me more information about the options available to me going forward.”

(Meta level: Decisions you made prior to reading this post about how to treat yourself were probably good given the information you had access to about trauma and recovery!)