Do We Really Need Twelve Years of School?

Many people in the class of 2016 will go out and go to college and learn what they want to become and what interests them but did they really need to learn all of what they did in highschool? Does someone dealing with computers really need to know that the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell or does a lawyer need to know complex math equations? The answer is no but a new question arises, what good is high school then? In elementary you learn all of the basics that you need and in middleschool you expand on that but in highschool you have to learn about things that you may use once or twice in the time that you will be out of school but most of the stuff you will learn is complex equations that are used to find some obscure point on a graph. You need all of the things you learn in elementary and you need a lot of the things in middle school but many of the things you learn in highschool you do not use so the question is what do we do to fix this? The useless things that you learn could be taken out or they could be substituted for programs that have more specialized curriculums to help students choose what they want to become. If they decide they don’t want what they took they would have more useful knowledge than if they went on the normal high school curriculum. Another option is career training centers but some schools do not offer programs like these The main problem today with what the students are learning is that teachers are forced to teach by the book that was approved by people in the government who have no concept of how useless the things that are being taught are.

I have always seen highschool as a stepping stool to college so even though i don’t like the way system is handled i still try to get good grades because i know that even though the things being taught are useless but if a college looks at your grades and sees that you got a low grade average in algebra or calculus they are more likely to pick a student with higher grades than you. You also don’t have to be in school to learn useful things, there is a great quote from mark twain “Don’t let schooling interfere with your education” meaning that learning is just not in school but you can learn out of school too. You can still be taught things that will be more useful than some things you learn in school. There are still plenty of classes that are useful like a language or an accounting class but many of the required courses like science for example, teach useless things. It is understandable that you should know the basics like how the plates move but do we really need to know the chemical equation for photosynthesis or the different types of bonds between atoms. if you want to be a botanist of a physicist then it the things should be known but if you are planning to be a secretary then what use are any of the mentioned things going to be? While I am not trying to tear apart the way school is taught I am only suggesting that there should be some kind of career path inside of normal schools to prepare students for college or the job they want when they get out of school.

Sometimes there are programs like the ones I have mentioned, there is a chapter of business professionals of America at my high school and the students help run a print shop by creating, printing and managing funds for it. But some schools however do not have this program to show them what it is going to be like in the real world. My whole view on the way the schools in America teach students is one that hopes that there should be some kind of path that students can choose to help them learn what they should be learning if they are in their field, and of course students that are undecided can always choose to stay in the normal system. The school system should change in a way that better prepares students to go out in the real world and thrive