The 1st 3, home finance, birds and bees and car maintenance can and should be taught at home! I mean really?!?! Start talking to your kids about your finances and how things work. YOU should be the one teaching your kid about the "birds and the bees." The same thing with car maintenace, if they want a car, they need to learn about care and maintenace BEFORE they have their own vehicle. Ideally you would be showing them the basics when they start learning how to drive.

The others, I can see how they would be beneficial, but if your school doesn't offer those subjects, there's always the INTERNET. Gee, we could just have our kids do a little browsing and they could learn these skills and so much more!

Butterfly, I do teach my daughter the birds and bees and also personal finance, but I like the way the school is doing it.  They add in the cost of college books, and many other things.  They also show how much it costs to live in the real world.  I can preach and preach to my kids, but sometimes it comes better from another person

i do agree that sex and drugs should be taught by the parents because even comprehensive sex education is sometimes biased, its better for kids to learn from their parents. now car repair i think thats a grear idea! because some of us now diddly about the subject. personal finance would also be pretty great, when i was in high school i took a class entitled single survival and i learned how to do things like balance a checkbook, budget my money, buy a car, and even how to sew on a button and basic things like that and i think it was a class that should have been mandatory for everyone.

hey people,

I was raised in a very overprotective religious homes.  My parents would have never taught me about drugs and the sex.  I learned about reproductive health through school.  If it wasn't for school I would have never known what my period was. 

not all parents will throroughly explain sex and drugs. So lets think about  the kids whose parents have a low IQ.

*home

This list looks like what school was like in the '50's... and I think that's a good thing. I think we've lost sight of the fact (or we havent' noticed) that many kids DON'T get this basic stuff at home, because people at home don't know how to do them, either. I know plenty of women who barely know how to get fuel into their cars; forget about changing the oil!! And how many of our families now are buried in credit card debt? Not because using a card is their only option, but because they just don't know how to make a simple household budget?

I would add one more thing to the list... basic grammar and spelling. It is pathetic how people butcher our language now. And I'm not just talking about comments on blog posts - around here, we tend to write like we talk, slang and all. But I've read essays written by mid-college students that mix up there, their and they're. How can you expect to keep a career-level job, if you can't utilize basic grammar, and spell words correctly?

Because parent's can not possibly teach those things to their kids.