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DISCLAIMER: MYP 4 students have submitted their Op-Eds to the St. Francis Post, below is one of the four chosen pieces that will be published. None of the opinions shared below reflect the beliefs of this newspaper and all articles have been edited for length and clarity.
The system ends up being extremely lacklustre with crucial aspects that young adults do not know how to handle in their life.
You’re an 18-year-old school graduate, you think are doing great in life, until you realize, well… you aren’t. You have no real-life knowledge. You do not know how to pay your taxes, or when to pay, or how much to pay or even what to pay for.
But that only scratches the surface for the amount of practical and essential things that are not being taught in our schools and are left to be figured out in our lifetime.
It is absolutely ridiculous that schools do not teach us the laws of our own country, our basic human rights, how to use our money in a smart way or how does money even work in the first place!
And it is not a factor of not having enough time to teach students all these things, we all know how to make a baking soda volcano, the majority of the periodic table, how to do long division, the history of others countries, the capitals of some states. While these are interesting facts, they will mostly be rendered useless in the majority of our lives.
Schools really give too much credit for things that we, in all likelihood, will never even end up using. A great example of this is a large portion of the entire Humanities subject. Why are old historical events deemed more important than the ongoing current problems with the world? Why is knowing the types of rivers ever going to be useful? Why would I ever need to know South African politics during the apartheid? And don’t get me wrong, Humanities could be extremely useful if only more relevant and interesting topics in that subject were discussed more commonly.
To be clear, learning is an extremely fundamental part in people’s lives and brain development, and we do learn at least some important things, the only problem is that if all that time we spent learning was put to better use, we would all be better off in life. We should have had the autonomy of choosing at a younger age what are our interests, what we want to be, and what we find irrelevant so we can have a more relevant school life. Not only would this make more logical sense, but students would also work harder and with more happiness as they are more in control of what they learn. It’s simple!
Concluding, schools should still have all these subjects but at least they should give their pupils some essential real-life knowledge and skills that will tremendously help them throughout the course of their lifetime as well as taking into consideration more about what the student's interests are.