Hmm, well I was pondering (I'm so sadistic), and I was wondering. Does the balance of subjects taught in schools equip people properly for later life? Is too much time being spent learning to factorise a quadratic or identify glacial features and not enough on how to manage your money, apply for a job, rent or buy a house, pay just the right amount of tax or how to get a loan without being ripped off?

Discuss

imo i think school wastes way too much time with useless courses but in regards to whether they teach you 'real life' skills i think they do. or at least at my high school (in canada) you can take a Managing Personal Resources, Financial Accounting Fundamentals, Living and Working With Children.
Those pretty much cover a lot of skills that you listed. But the issue isn't whether they're being offered, it's that they aren't requisites. Practically no one takes these courses unless they don't plan on doing post-secondary school (or at least that's the case at my school).
I do agree that they're should be some sort of class that you have to take that teaches you 'street' smarts but i think they make the parents assume responsibility for teaching you this stuff.

Absolutely not.

And the worst thing about it is that the subjects get a purely academic treatment. Math would be much more useful if it was taught how it was applied, as well as science. Those two are extremely useful subjects that are handy to know, but if not taught from a practical, application based standpoint, loses a lot of people. Not enough time is spent on government and economics, and how that relates the the individuals, and too much time is spent making people "cultured" but completely unable to do basic tasks.

I think my HS at least tries to prepare you for the outside world.
we've got economics, which is a great class and I think we'll actually learn something useful - the teacher is great, he doesn't teach from the book as much as he teaches from his own experiences.
we've also got the biggest joke of a class ever - Family Living. Its taught by a teacher who has had no real relationships, no husband/children and lives with her parents even though shes about 50. Our big assignment was plantbabies. Yes, plants you had to pretend were your children and carry them around for 2 weeks. Pointless. Completely pointless.
so theres my two cents. do with them as you wish

Depends on the classes you take...For me, my HS does a pretty good job with managing money and tips like that...Just have to take the right classes like marketing, business etc..Alot of the other stuff you mentioned is just common sense and can't really be taught. There really is a difference between school smart and street smart.

Correction. There's a difference between smart, school smart, and street smart.

Life management stuff should be learned on your own. Its your life and you should manage it however you like.
The diversity of subjects taught is also a great thing in my opinion. Sure, you might not use it later in life, but being educated is about getting knowledge across a variety of disciplines. If you look at people like Da Vinci, Euler, or Newton, they all made significant contributions to a many different fields. You shouldn't be narrow-minded because you won't know when you'll need to use something.

Take Neopets for example. There have many many lenny conundrums that require the use of calculus or geometry. I don't think you would consider either of those a life skill if you're an accountant, but they are still skills that you'd be better off with than without.

A lot of the classes that are required are useless. If I think about it, all my current required classes are useless.

Chemistry - Never gonna be mixing chemicals or anything like that
Geometry - Triangles and congruent stuff will never help
U.S. History - The past doesn't really help MY future, unless I'm going to be pres.
English - I know how to read and write already.
P.E. is also required in Illinois buuut that one is useful and needed for today's increasingly lazy society.

However, I think the idea of these classes isn't that you need to know what they're about but to test your interests in subjects for the future. If you hate math, you probably shouldn't be a mathematician or statistician. If you love history, maybe you should be a history teacher or museum curator.

I also think the idea is to continue your thinking and keep your mind working. Sort of like raising your IQ and just common sense in general making you a smarter person overall, not just in the subjects.

I think the stuff taught in school isn't meant to prepare you for life
it's meant to prepare you for a job
and it doesn't do that very well...
But really, I think (highschool's) main purpose is to spark interest, because few people want to do a job they know nothing about. College also provides that a lil' bit, with the required classes, but you really get to delve deeper into your subject later on, which prepares you for a job. And everyone knows you have to have a job to buy paypal to buy illegit mils and NC

Actually, I disagree that those subjects are useless. They are taught in a way that seems useless, but the information contained with them are actually pretty important, even from day to day life.

For instance, chemistry is all around us, if you live somewhere cold for instance, it's chemistry and chemical properties that resulted in the realization that we could pour salt on ice and cause it to melt. Chemistry is much more than mixing chemicals together. Geometry has a variety of uses to find distances to and from places, when you start buying houses and want to renovate, geometry will be incredibly useful. A thorough knowledge of US History should guide and be a basis on how you form rationalizations every time you go and vote. Unfortunately, these classes don't really instill their real life application to the students, and really just stress the academic side, which is a shame.

it's not that they don't attempt to apply them to real life because a lot of the textbooks and even teachers will attempt to give you real life situations where you can apply the things you learn, the only problem is that often times real life isn't quite as ideal as a textbook question. i'm currently in calculus and just finished reviewing derivatives which are used to find the rate of change of anything. in the textbook example they give you a perfect sphere, cube, or object that you know a wonderful little formula for and can easily plug in the formulas and follow your teachers example and apply it to the textbook question. Now if you were to try and apply this to real life then you aren't going to get an ideal sphere, cube, or object that you know a wonderful little formula for. Instead the real life applications that the books try and show you are much harder than the textbook questions and most people just don't attempt them because they're lazy and don't want to think about how they can apply them in real life.


And i personally think the subjects covered in school is completely sufficient. With all the english classes you learn how to read literature so if it ever appears in your life you know how to not only read but read actively and analyze anything you want so you aren't as easily swayed by flashing lights and made up statistics. Math is quite obvious with why it's taught. Science is taught to give students a basic understanding of how the world works and i feel it gives a plenty sufficient understanding to help you get through life. History not only teaches you about history itself, but also teaches you about governments not only in the U.S. but other countries, and shows you the process of a government's success or failure so you can attempt to catch a failing government early and avoid disaster. and i believe those are all the required classes so i believe my point is made

I think that American school systems should let students declare a major in high school, too. Some already do. Or at least offer practical courses as electives, and make a class like budgeting a requirement. Many of the classes I took/am taking in school aren't going to help me with my medical career at all. And I don't see how most of the algebra and calculus I learned is going to help me in life, period. Or Geometry...ew, geometry. Obviously math is necessary, as well as English, science, and history. But what about requiring everyone to have arts classes (I like art/music and took more, but lots of people aren't artistic at all) and two PE classes (yes, it's important to be athletic, but PE here is useless and doesn't teach anything) like how it is where I live? Not so necessary.

The only truly helpful classes I've taken in high school are DE classes offered at the local college.

It all depends...

MATH:

school makes you memorize a whole bunch of stuff that you may not need in your life. but its important so....but anyway, not everyone's gonna become like a mathematician.

LA:
language arts, its not that important. yeah sure, we need to know how to read and write and stuf...but its not like every ones gonna be a writer when they gorw up..

THE OTHER BASIC STUFF:

i think home ecs it the most important...
PE and stuff you could do elsewhere. overall, i think school is a waste of time...

EDIT: creepishly, this is like the longest post i've ever written.

i believe that school is a waste of time. i'm currently learning calculus 3 and i know for a fact that i would NEVER use any of this stuff in my life ever again after i pass the class. All these required GE's are BS imo.

The only school that helps me, is when I take classes for my major in college, liberals and basic classes are a huge waste of time and is really stupid.

I believe that school should teach us the basics, and then leave us to decide to what extent we would like to take our core classes, like math to pre calc, calc, trig, etc. Forcing us to learn such things when they are most likely not needed because of career choices is only giving people a bad taste for school. That's just my opinion. I could go on for hours.