The thought of high school classes preparing us for the real world is sometimes seen as a joke. However, the importance of these classes should be considered. We do have required classes to help prepare us for the real world, but we need more.
Personal finance is one of those classes that attempts to prepare us, even so, I feel that the class only being a quarter might not be long enough. There isn’t enough time to comprehend and retain all of the information given in such a short time.
Other than personal finance, I’m not sure there are many other classes ready to prepare us for life outside of high school. As well as culinary and home repair.
One major class I think should be required for graduation is first aid. We go over cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) training in health class and that’s a good thing but that is about the extent of it. We need to go in depth more on that and other parts of first-aid.
The kind of first aid I’m talking about is being able to give it as well as being able to treat yourself if you get a cut or harm yourself. Making sure you can do basic first aid on someone or yourself while an ambulance is on its way can save someone’s life.
This first-aid class would also teach students how to keep a first-aid kit and what to keep in one. It boggles my mind that we don’t have a class like this to help us.
A class that could also come in handy is how to effectively get a job/apply for one. This could be put together with an English class but it needs to be taught.
Simple repairs on cars or bikes could also be something to learn. Oftentimes parents teach their kids how to do these things but sometimes they don’t know how to do that themselves. Some things could be fixed simply but often we don’t know how to do it, so we have to take it to a car repair shop and spend a ton of money.
Schools teach us some skills but often they don’t teach us how to apply them. You can know a whole lot of things but if you don’t apply them, they can turn out to be useless.
We need to be taught things that will benefit us outside of high school, not just things to get us good grades. Grades don’t matter in the real world, we need to be taught and learn things practically.
