Are The Subjects That We're Being Taught Important?

It's always felt trivial that at school you learn English, Maths, Science, Geography, History, and Sport. But, as students grow older and prepare to enter adulthood, it becomes glaringly obvious that school may prepare you for tertiary education, but does it prepare you well enough for how to manage your life as an adult? The truth is, it doesn't. Or it doesn't do a good enough job at least.

Going into adulthood, suddenly you need to be responsible for your own finances, which includes tax, income, and investments. The most that I have been prepared for all of this is to calculate how much tax I owe the ATO in maths. However, schools need to be physically teaching students how to file their taxes, how to budget their wages responsibly, and how to invest their money wisely.

Additionally, schools may be good at teaching you how to analyse literature, but that might not be a useful skill when the jump to adulthood is so jarring. Emotional regulation is something which people are just expected to know how to do, but in reality it's an incredibly difficult thing to be able to do, especially when it seems like there is not enough time to sit down and take a deep breath in stressful situations.

Furthermore, how to run a household may have been taughted by some parents, but some children miss out on important skills such as cooking, cleaning, and taking care of themselves. While schools do implement some basic subjects such as Food Tech and wood work, these subjects are not run for long enough or give students enough freedom to experiment and build up their skills enough for them to be counted as satisfactory enough.

Thus, while schools may help you grow your critical thinking skills and teach you how to calculate integrals, sometimes adulthood is the furthest thing away from that and it's important that we support our students in becoming the best version of themselves that they can be as adutls.