School needs to teach life skills

In “Finding Nemo,” the students expected to be taught and were taught ways to survive on field trips… so why can’t we? Do they want teens to end up like Rapunzel? Not knowing how the world really works? Being held back from what we need to know because there’s no one there to teach us? 

The school needs to teach life skills and not only academics. Kids are in school for 10-plus years just to learn basic academics instead of things that we really need to learn. Most might say academics are more important and your parents should teach you life skills, but that is incorrect. Parents send their kids to school to learn. Being taught life skills is a part of learning. Instead of teaching us about the same thing every year in history class or in English, they should teach us about how taxes work, or how to file them, or how to get a simple job. How car insurance works, how health care works, and the list could go on… the basic things that they should teach us, we are not being taught in school but instead are forced to sit at a desk and stare at a board for 10-plus years. 

The impact of knowing these things would be tremendous! Students could bring more business since they have knowledge on how to start one, they’ll know how to file taxes and pay them, and they could learn the laws of the government since we don’t get taught that, except for the Ten Commandments, in school. There would be new techniques and better business and who doesn’t like the money? Everyone would be taught the ways of the world. We could do anything. We long to help each other out.

The system is setting us up for failure instead of preparing us for the actual world. It’s like putting a polar bear in a forest and saying, “Survive.” Polar bears know nothing about tropical rainforests… just like we won’t know about how the real world works unless we have someone to teach us. 

Shalini Jaiswal, director of Maple Bear South Asia’s academic program, wrote in “Higher Education Digest” that “current 21st-century literature indicates that our future citizens need to be multi-literate, creative and innovative. Learning is a complex system of interactive processes.” Learning was indicted in the 21st century. Usually, we go based off the past. Therefore, they should teach us basic life skills. It doesn’t even make sense to teach us everything except for the basics. Students believe this, too. A 2019 study by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation surveyed students on their thoughts on life after high school and found that “81% of students said they thought high school should focus most closely on helping students develop real-world skills such as problem-solving and collaboration rather than focusing so much on specific academic-subject-matter expertise,” according to a 2019 “EducationWeek” article. Students expect to be taught things that are going to help them later on in life. It should be an expectation to help set us up for the real world.

Being taught basic life skills in school would help the world be more successful as a whole. If everyone knew how to file taxes, find jobs and make conversations, how the law works, and how to drive, it would be smoother for everyone. There would be fewer homeless, fewer arrests, fewer hustlers, and less poverty. Everyone doesn’t know the way of life, and not everyone has a family to be taught these basic things. So instead of trying to keep teaching us the same thing, teach us greater things so we can succeed as a whole.