How much do you really learn from school?

12/14/20

Obviously, we learn very important lessons at school as well as away from school. Academic lessons are usually theoretical, meaning, you never truly learn where these lessons are applied in the real world. For the most part, a lot of the facts and skills you see at school will barely help you in real life. Knowing how to complete the square, having the periodic table memorized, or knowing what battle strategies were used in world war 2 will not help everyone in the long run, with a few exceptions of course. You may be “smarter” than your peers, or know more about certain things than your average Joe, but you won't necessarily require all of that information in your everyday life, but the lessons that you learn outside of school are more practical and useful for us in our real lives. In my personal opinion being out in “real life” has a more significant role in teaching us important and valuable lessons than a school does, we learn the most important lessons away from school, in the real world.

First off, society and seeing the world outside of a classroom practically teaches us how life functions and “works”, and how we could handle the different things that life throws our way. Since the lessons taught in school are mostly theoretical, we never completely learn the real aspects that you will see in life. Sometimes, we just have an ideal image of life, or how we see it in a classroom, for example, it may seem cliche but one thing I have seen in school that I have never fully accepted is that we learn some stories about love in classes like English when we are at school, but we never fully understand what real love is from reading a book that is supposed to demonstrate how to love someone, or really what love means, as well as how often these stories can happen to someone in real life. In contrast, when you experience love yourself, personally, you can gain a realistic view of what love really is. You may be able to get a general understanding of how to love from reading a text about someone else besides yourself experiencing love, but being there is how someone could really, truly learn what it is about and how to fall into it with someone. Saying this, society and the outside world can better teach us lessons related to life than schools could have possibly ever done for a single person.

Being just 16 this doesn’t apply to me as much as it would to someone that has been all the way through the school curriculum, I don’t fully understand something like this myself, but I asked my mom and dad what they wished they were taught at school that would have helped them and given them a slight advantage the most later on in life, and their answers were very similar to one another's. Managing money. The importance of handling money responsibly is very valuable. And our modern schools fail to teach this to young adults that will need this as they grow up and need to know how to do these things. During my 2 and a half years in high school, I have taken accounting, finance, and several other business classes, but with the knowledge, my head currently contains I would fail epically if I needed to do anything money-related right this second. These classes try to explain accounting procedures, financing arrangements, and a small bit about business structures, but I feel as if they do not focus much on personal finances, saving, or investing. Things that seem like they should have at least a little bit of light shed upon. 

Another one of the many key things you can learn in the real world that is ignored in school is resilience. At school, a teacher will be there for you have a poor day but in real life when something isn’t working out for you you have to overcome whatever adversity is tossed at you all by yourself. For example, you won’t have someone to help you out, things like this are things that you need to know as you grow into an adult.  At school, you are constantly being helped out by most teachers if things aren’t necessarily going your way, as I previously stated this doesn’t happen when you are all alone in the real world. Resilience is all about pushing through, even when it gets tough, it’s about fighting on until your life improves. It’s pretty obvious that in life things won’t always be smooth sailing, and this is typically something that needs to be learned yourself after you have left school and are left to fend for yourself in the real world. 

Another huge topic that I feel like school tries to expose kids to is career paths. What I've seen myself is that they do try pretty hard to give you a way to explore different job opportunities, but the way they do it is executed pretty poorly. One way they have tried to do it for me is through a website called Xello, this website allows you to take a survey to see what career may fit for you. It gives you various questions ranging from if you like to work in an office, or if working with children sounds like something that you might like. At first glance, This may sound like a great way to expose kids my age to the different jobs that may suit them, but I feel like the system this website uses is flawed. I have not heard from any of my friends or any other people that have also taken this survey that the job that this survey has recommended fits for them. When I took the survey, a few of the careers that were suggested for me were a waste management worker and crane operator. Things I would never see myself doing in 1,000 years. And exploring different opportunities is instrumental in finding your passion in life. Once you know what your passion is, you can set goals, make choices, and do what you love. Being in the real world, trying out different career paths is a much better alternative. I’ve heard in some cases people, like my dad, will go to college to study something for 4 years but then they decide to go with a career that has nothing to do with what they studied. Realistically how could you think a job is right for you if you aren’t in the field doing the job. 

Another great point is, a community can teach us how we can improve our personality and better ourselves in general. For example, if a person is shy or timid, and they need to socialize or work outside of a school type of environment, his or her daily experiences help them to cope and almost fix this feeling. Being in a workspace or public area, almost being urged into a confrontation with another person, will surely teach you how to communicate with people. Whereas, you never learn social skills or how to cope with your negative emotions as well as characteristics, as I stated previously, being a shy person in general. You may say, “you talk to people at school all the time what do you mean?” I agree fully, but being a student myself I can confidently say that talking at school and talking outside of school is a whole different game. Talking at school with anyone but your friends are forced and pushed at you, whether that's by a teacher or some other scenario. Resulting in uncomfortable communication.  As a result of my initial viewpoint, the lessons that a person learns outside of school help him a lot to acquire a better self-awareness and to improve his or her personality.

In conclusion, taking all the mentioned comments and reasons into consideration, I would like to say that although we without a doubt learn very important lessons related to, for instance, science, art, engineering, literature as well as other subjects in school, and school may attempt to teach us about things that they think will help us out as we grow up and mature, I think that society does a much better job and gives us a much better understanding of real-life and teaches us much more valuable things that will actually mean something to you in your life, for example, how to use money properly and effectively, guild you down the right path to give you a career that will help you to be successful down the road, as well as social skills that school fails to supply you with it can help us to improve upon ourselves more effectively than any school ever could.