Fourteen years, beginning as young as just four years old, is the average amount of time people spend in their lives inside of school. Schools teach their students a variety of subjects from language arts to mathematics, and students gain basic knowledge to help them be successful in life. Skills such as spelling, reading, writing, counting, and even time management are being implanted into young learners’ minds. For fourteen years, children and teens learn how to function inside of the classroom. But what happens when these students are sent into the real world?

From either preschool or kindergarten all the way to twelfth grade, children are put into a class that is supposed to prepare them for life and set them up for success. Although school can help one be successful, the sad truth is that school does not prepare you for life outside of school. How so, you ask? As a child, education is a very important thing to obtain. But why does school not teach students things such as filing taxes, buying a house, or even maybe taking a loan from the bank? School teaches kids basic forms of education such as the reading and writing mentioned previously, and while a lot of  these subjects are helpful, a decent amount have left students asking themselves, “When will I ever use this?”

A class that pushes a student to ask such a question reveals that the class is irrelevant to the student taking it. School focuses students’ education on pushing them into a higher level of education. Many of the higher level classes of a specific subject can be seen as unnecessary unless a student is pursuing that subject as a major in college. This is because most of the information you will receive from these higher classes tend to be a review from the predecending class. Even while pursuing a major for college, the way the requirements for graduation is set up at least half of one’s schedule can be seen as useless or unrelated to his/her long term goals. When correlating to subjects taught at school, most, if not all, of the information one will need outside of a schooling environment is given to them potentially between their eighth and tenth grade years.

Although school has been considered to be repetitive or even irrelevant to the outside world in this article so far, there are a few classes that can help students prepare for what is to come after moving away from their parents. Classes such as Food Nutrition and Culinary Arts can help students with learning how to cook food, and the properties of food such as their nutritional values. There are also personal and business finance classes which teach students overall how to save and manage their income. Other classes such as Automotive Services can give students the knowledge of cars and how to perform minor repairs. Finally there is Principles of Family and Human Services, also referred to as Home Economics, which is informative about human development, life management, and the interpersonal relationships held between oneself, their family, and their community

Some may argue that one can obtain the education they need for life outside of school from their parents or guardians. Although this is true, in most aspects, rising young adults should be more willing to become parentally independent for as one can not live off their parents forever. School should place students in a position where they can fend for themselves and be educated about certain topics outside of school. Whether it be after high school or after college,  will you be ready for life outside of school?