Schools offer a large variety of classes, but not all of them seem to prepare students for life outside the classroom. Some courses teach students practical skills that will actually be used, while others feel disconnected from real world needs.
Classes like Family Consumers Science, personal financing, health and civics teach life skills such as budgeting, paying bills, cooking, the law and understanding personal health. These are things that will be remembered and used following graduation.
However classes like math and chemistry don’t feel as relevant to everyday life. Students spend years learning about pi, invisible numbers, graphs and square roots things most people will never use outside of a classroom. These classes can be very beneficial to some, but they don’t seem relevant for most students.
Math in particular could be more helpful if it focused on real life things like budgeting, paying bills and understanding credit. These are skills that everyone needs no matter what their future career is.
Chemistry is another class that can feel disconnected from everyday life for many students. While it teaches important concepts about how substances interact a lot of students won’t use chemical reactions or formulas in their daily lives unless they go into the field. Because of this, it can feel hard to stay engaged. It could be more beneficial if it focused on medicines and nutrition.
Another issue is how schools tend to treat students all the same even though everyone thinks and learns differently. Students are given the same tests, expected to learn the same way and judged by the same standards. However people have different strengths.
When students are tested the same way the results can be very different. One student might do amazing on the test while another student will struggle on the test. This is not because they aren’t capable but because everyone thinks and works differently. Someone who struggles in math might be a great artist, writer or scientist.
This idea is captured in a well known quote. “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” This relates to the school system because school districts make students take the same test, but everyone thinks very differently and has different strengths. Schools also lead students to believe they are stupid if they don’t succeed in every class or get a high grade like others.
The structure of schools can also feel unrealistic. Real life jobs usually give people more freedom with technology and succeed through their own strengths instead of making everyone work the same way.
Schools should really start focusing more on preparing students for real world environments by allowing more independence, flexibility, and different learning styles.
