Why Life Skills Should Be Taught In School

High Schoolers often ask “Why do I have to learn this?” or “When will I ever use this in life?” Most students feel like they aren’t using or learning enough life skills in school. Life skill classes teach students abilities like leadership, social skills, how to handle money, and cooking or paying taxes. Life skills teach us the stuff we need to know to survive. These classes are made to educate teens and help them build their minds for the world beyond high school.

And so it proves to us why life skills should be taught in school.

Life Skills should be brought back into the school system, and be more encouraged for teachers to teach them. As teens leave high school to start a new chapter in their life, many don’t know the basic skills that are vital to adulthood. Most teens don’t know how to pay taxes, get a job, write a resume or pay bills.

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Without the learning of life skills, teens can struggle when it comes to basic real-world responsibilities.

Albert Einstein once said that everybody’s 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. So many teens relate to the fish swimming upstream in class never finding their gifts thinking they are stupid, believing they are useless. If you look at vehicles 150 years ago and compare it to now, big difference right? Look at phones 150 years ago, it progressed so much.

And if you look at a classroom 150 years ago compared to now, nothing has changed.

Schools were made to train students to work in factories, that's why we have to sit in straight rows nice and neat, to raise your hand if we want to speak. Give us a short break to eat and for 8 hours tell us what to think. And make us compete for an A. A letter which determines product quality, grade A of meat. The world has progressed from back then, now we need people who think creatively, innovatively, creditably, independently with the ability to connect.

If a doctor were to give all his patents one type of medicine the results would be horrible, so many people would get sick, yet when it comes to school that’s exactly what happens. One teacher stands in front of 20 students each one having different strains, different needs, different gifts, different dreams, yet they teach us the same thing the same way. Fredrick J. Kelley invented standardized testing said, “These tests are too crude to be used and should be abandoned.”

School teaches us how to memorize dots. True education should teach you how to connect them. True education teaches you how to catch a fish, and school teaches you yeah you caught the fish but you didn’t show your work so it doesn’t count, throw it back. Of course, some of the stuff we learn in school is justifiable. We need reading, writing, and some arithmetic, but are you telling us igneous and metamorphic rocks are more important than self-care? If suicide is the 3rd leading cause of death in ages 10-24. And Harvard studies suggest the biggest predictor for success is self-control and emotional health. Then why the heck aren’t we taught how to stress, bullies, or rejection. How about anxiety or depression? You know the skills we need for our entire lives.