29 Things We Should Have Learned In High School
By Liz Heather
This post could also be known as The Things They Should Have Taught Us In High School but I can’t agree on who’s precisely to blame here, so I’m blaming us all.
I’m not saying that the things we’re taught in high school and college are useless — some of those things are crazy important to know. But we’re definitely not being groomed to be fully functioning adults by the time they let us out on our own at around age 22, if not at a younger age.
In a perfect world, these are the courses they should have made us take:
- Doing Your Taxes 101
- Internships: A Modern Slavery
- Making Friends As An Adult
- The Ins and Outs of a Mortgage
- Cleanliness and You: The Study of Personal Hygiene
- The Convergence of Love And Sex
- Interpreting Family Relationships
- The Normalization of Drug Dependency
- How To Date Many People Before Committing To Marriage
- Adult-Onset Body Image Issues
- Balancing A Work Life and A Social Life
- The Wonders of Travel
- Career Change in Unstable Economies
- Understanding Divorce
- Kindness: A Gentle Analysis
- Healthy Meal Planning
- The Struggles of Depression
- The Realities of Single Parenthood
- Body Maintenance
- The Glorification of Alcohol
- Finance Organization
- The Exploration of Alternative Lifestyles
- Managing Unemployment
- Dealing With Emotional Unavailability
- The Importance of Debt
- Child Development — yes, this exists, IN CHILD STUDIES PROGRAMS, but everyone needs this course.
- The Effects of Grief
- Maintaining A Savings Account
- Elderly Planning
If we were exposed to any of these classes growing up, who knows what kind of a society we’d get to live in now? I’m just saying.
A math teacher once told me why he thought kids would benefit from taking math (and I’m talking about the more advanced math that gets taught in the later years of high school). He said something along the lines of, “We don’t teach it because you need to know this stuff later. We teach it solely because people find it difficult. You’re going to encounter difficult things in your life and it ultimately comes down to how you’re going to choose to solve them. Whether you give up or try the best you can to figure it out, that’s always up to you. That’s why math is important.”
Now maybe you think that’s a lame thought, but I really loved it and still do. Though, we’d have all definitely benefited from any of those courses I listed above. When I’m running the world, you better be damn sure those are getting taught. MAD TAUGHT.