Have you ever caught yourself lamenting the fact that schools don’t teach us basic life skills, such as filing taxes, the ins and outs of renting, or what your rights at work are?
Lament no longer, because one council in Adelaide is running a seven-week crash course in ‘How to Adult‘, and it will tackle all of those things and more.
Onkaparinga Council, in Adelaide’s south, kicked off the seven-week course last night, and over the next two months, the course will cover areas such as budgeting, credits, contracts, tax, Centrelink and Medicare, motor vehicles, including the purchasing and maintenance of, and employment and your rights at work.
It’s free for anyone aged 16 to 25, and let’s be honest, a lot of us could definitely use a course like this. I can’t be the only one whose parents have reprimanded them for not knowing how to balance a chequebook (ignoring the fact that most young people don’t even have chequebooks…), and I’m surely not the only person who had to guesstimate my way through my first tax return.
Plus, I’m pretty sure most of us would love some tips on how to deal with Centrelink, because for most people it’s just a game of who can stay on hold the longest.
The ABC spoke to a senior lecturer in sociology about the stereotype that millennials don’t know how to adult, and he said it came down to social changes rather than inherent laziness.
“We live in a service economy where lots of these kinds of things are outsourced whereas in the past they probably weren’t”, said Dr Nathan Manning of the University of Adelaide.
See, Mum! It’s not my fault! It’s the gig economy! Ha!
Initiatives like this from local councils are great, but I still maintain that schools should try teaching students a few of these skills before throwing them into the deep end with nothing but a certificate and an ATAR.
Compound interest is one of the few things I remember from maths class, specifically because of its real-world applications, so why not throw in a few basic lessons about taxes as well? And I appreciate that my school tried to teach me how to make and then photograph tacos for a food magazine, but something more practical like ‘how to poach an egg so you don’t have to spend $15 on breakfast in a café’ might have been more helpful.
Fingers crossed more councils introduce classes like this, so that younger millennials and gen-Zers won’t be reduced to this each EOFY:
