I've been on many such courses as I work in schools, and I'm now technically a "fire warden" in one.

Let me tell you what we're taught, every year for about the last 20+ years:

GET OUT.

Raise the alarm.

GET EVERYONE OUT.

Don't fight the fire unless absolutely necessary.

GET OUT.

That fire extinguisher won't do crap against an established fire.

GET OUT.

Don't stop for anything.

GET OUT.

The official line is that the "extinguisher" is not an "extinguisher" but to help you secure your exit if you're entirely trapped by the fire. That's it.

We're told - by ex-firefighters who specialise in the training nowadays, know we deal with tiny little tots, and have seen horrors of all kinds - to not try, to get out, and anything larger than a wastepaper basket... forget it. Just get out.

The "hands-on" demo is an exercise in disappointment. Water ones you can piss more water on the fire, and from further away! CO2 ones are going out of fashion and don't really do very much and can be dangerous to you (they're being replaced by modified foam powders). Powder ones just make a damn mess and you better hope you covered every single inch of the fuel with the limited amount you have or it'll just reignite.

Basically, as a fire warden, in a school, where there's the most critical usage of equipment, the most expense spent on fire equipment, lots of training on fire equipment, things like design and technology labs with CNCs, laser-cutters, etc., swimming pools with chlorine and other chemicals, science labs with all kinds of lovely flammables, propane, gas heaters and boilers, cooking rooms with all kinds of fire hazard, everything you can imagine... as a FIRE WARDEN, we're told to just get out, and get everyone else out.

They're not for you to fight a fire, that's completely the wrong terminology. They're to put out the very, very, very beginnings of a fire that you could do in a thousand more effective ways, like "taking the burning bin away from other flammables" or "closing the oven" or just letting it burn out.

I've been doing this for 23 years in schools - some of them specialist behaviour schools where kids would try to set the school on fire. I can name real incidents - a candle left to burn in an unoccupied room that a member of staff was living in (boarding school), a cardboard box left on top of a stove, a grease-fire in a canteen kitchen hood. Each time the alarm was sounded within seconds, automatically.

The worst was the latter - actual flames going up out of the hood and visible outside the school, and we evacuated the whole building in under 2 minutes. NOBODY in their right mind was going to tackle that fire.

In all that time, I've never picked up or used an extinguisher except in the training you mention, and nor has anyone else.

Extinguishers aren't for what you think they are. If you're not willing to use it on candle just seconds after the flame gets big (which means you'll piss off a lot of people putting out fires that were likely going to burn out anyway), it's not worth using it at all.

If you ever have to stop to think "what kind of fire is this, what kind of extinguisher should I use", it's likely too late for that extinguisher to do anything.

Just get out. Every time.

Raise the alarm, get out, get everyone out.

The extinguisher is for when there's a kid stuck in a room, surrounded entirely by fire, no way to get them out, and you're literally willing to sacrifice yourself to try to get to them THIS INSTANT rather than hang on a little for the professionals. Even then, fuck that. I've seen them. They won't work like you think. You can put out a small wastepaper basket, that's about it. In most instances a fire blanket is actually far more useful.

You want to train your kids? Train them to evacuate, raise alarms and to check and fit smoke alarms correctly as they get older. A well-trained school has a THOUSAND CHILDREN, from toddlers to stroppy teenagers, adults, guests, staff and visitors, all out of danger and accounted for within 2 minutes. TWO MINUTES.

Just get the fuck out. Everything else is property, objects, things. You burn or get overcome while trying to put out a fire, someone's got to risk THEIR life to come get YOU out.

And anything you COULD have put out? It'll be out by the time you're outside OR the professionals will get it out, no problem. With 10,000 times the water in seconds.

All these stories here about "X caught fire, and I used this extinguisher" ask yourself the questions: Who called the fire in? Who got everyone else out? Who set off the alarm? Why would you not do that FIRST? Because if the extinguisher hadn't worked (and it won't on anything non-trivial), you just cost yourself over a minute of your evacuation time and now people are caught off-guard and an exit is blocked, and STILL nobody knows about it outside the immediate vicinity.

There should also be mandatory First Aid courses. In my country First Aid courses are only mandatory for your driver license.

Your high school didn’t do that?

I fired one off as a kid because I wanted to know what it was like. My parents were annoyed but not really mad; when I shot the other one off because the first was so fun, they were mad!

Would make for a fun and memorable lesson too, vs like "how to do income taxes"