We go to school for 13 years of our life. Thirteen years of sitting in a classroom listening to teachers talk about a huge assortment of topics. This can be math, reading, science, etc. However, the school system does not help us become what we want to be or teach us valuable life skills.
I am 17 years old. I have been in school for almost 11 and a half years. I know how to find the sine of a triangle, I have read Othello, and I know how cell respiration works. I do not know how to do taxes, jumpstart a car, or how to take out a loan. What if instead of learning pointless things like trigonometry, we learned useful skills. As a society would be much more efficient, because we would know how to figure things out ourselves. Wouldn’t it be better if people were more self-sufficient? We rely too much on “googling” things rather than having prior knowledge.
I want to major in journalism or political science in college. I am currently taking one class that will help me in either of those fields. The class I am writing this column for, journalism. Why do I need to take three science classes in my high school career? I will not be doing anything involving science in my life. I should be taking classes that help me in my future career, like journalism. I could be taking classes that are different kinds of journalism like feature writing and investigative reporting. That would be much more useful than what I am currently learning in AP Earth and Environmental Science.
Some people will say that learning an assortment of topics is good for people’s development. They will say that it teaches us to learn things we don’t want to learn. We should instead learn useful things that will help us later in life. We may not be dying to learn how to fix a car, but it is much more useful than learning about parabolas.
Yes, we do have the classes, but they are not required. There is a cooking class but it is not needed to graduate. There are classes such as business and finance, but they aren’t taken seriously and are taught by teachers who are not experts. Classes like cooking and finance should be treated like a math class so that we are ready for the real world which requires these skills. In addition, there should be classes that teach ways to deal with people such as having a difficult boss or arguing in a relationship. The knowledge to deal with these problems would create a much more efficient and productive society.
The required classes we have nowadays are pointless. I will never use science in my career field. Why am I required to take two foreign language classes? I have no intention to move out of the U.S. and even if I did, the classes we take, only teach the bare minimum. Why do we have to take a gym class freshman year? How will that help us later in life? Schools should be making us better citizens and more knowledgeable of things that actually matter We need to take classes that help with our desired field or just simply dealing with everyday experiences.
– By Tanner Althoff