“Give a man a fish, he will eat for 7 days, teach him how to fish, and he will have food for a lifetime.” This parable should be the goal of the American education system, but they are missing the mark.

As a high school student, I frequently find myself wondering if everything I’m taught in school is as important as my teachers make it sound, because at this point I’m not entirely convinced that I will end up working at McDonalds my whole life because I got a 75% on my pythagorean theorem test my freshman year. I’ve also started to wonder how I’m going to function in the real world when I have to file taxes and pay a mortgage, things school has yet to mention.  

Frankly, the public school system is failing the youth of America. High school prepares us for when we don’t have a calculator on hand even though our generation is practically surgically attached to our smart phones.They teach us how babies are made and how to prevent that, but they don’t prepare us for later in life when we actually want a child and have to successfully raise it.  We are taught how to identify the parts of a sentence, but not how to detect the early signs of mental illness, a skill which could help us literally save the lives of our classmates.

High school leaves teenagers completely unprepared for the real world and is failing to teach kids the skills necessary to thrive in their adult life. Most students don’t know how to pay bills, budget money, or even how credit cards and interest rates work,which can have detrimental effects later on in life.  We have four years of math; it’s not unreasonable to teach kids both how to pay a mortgage as well as the quadratic formula. If the mission of school is to prepare us for the real world, it’s time it started doing it in ways that actually meet that goal.