Our schools are preparing students for college, not for life.

What are we teaching our students to become in our school systems? What are we preparing our students for? Are we preparing them to be entrepreneurs, or employees? Students are forced to wake up at 6:00 AM, sit in 7 classes a day, be tested, provided extra work to take home in order to come back the next day, and do it all over again. They're told when they can and can't eat, sleep, communicate with each other, and even use the bathroom. They’re trained to think that if you work hard enough, you'll be successful, but no one ever takes the time to teach students how to be creative or how to believe in themselves. Everything students are being taught is all in preparation for college. The United States high school systems prepare students for college, not for success.

To prepare for a career you need certain life skills that school just doesn’t provide. Skills like how to file your taxes, or knowing what your social security number is, as well as how to use it. Now does school provide you with some skills? Of course. Students learn how to calculate percentages, and the contents of the Constitution, as well as how to calculate the volume of objects. All useful tools, but where will these tools come into play? Will you need to know the contents of the Constitution when it’s time for a job interview? Will it matter that you know how to calculate the volume of certain objects when it’s time to pay your taxes? I’ll give you a little hint, no.

According to CBS News, H&R Block developed a survey that would inquire if adults in the US felt like the information they were taught in school was useful. The results determined that 84% of working adults were taught topics and skills in school that they didn’t use after graduation.

This means out of the fourteen years of American schooling, only 16% of all of the information students have spent their lives studying, stressing over, and being tested on, is almost worthless. 8 times out of 10, that quiz you’re studying for, won’t matter in 10 years. That 5 page essay you’re being forced to write, will not serve any purpose when you’re 25. Even that project you spent all night crying over because it just had to be perfect, won’t really pick you up and take you anywhere.

So if all of that hard work won’t be relevant in a couple years, why do it? What are our schools preparing us for? United States schools prepare us for college. They teach you that the harder you work, and the higher your points are, the better schools you’ll make it to. The class president with straight A’s and MVP on the soccer team will make it to all of the greats. Princeton, Harvard, Yale, Duke, UCLA, and Columbia just to name a few. Schools like this are known for producing success stories; for producing top doctors, government officials, and top-paid corporate lawyers. What about the digital artists, or the cosmetologists? What about the business owners or the entertainers? The skills for careers such as those would not be mentioned in school, because you don’t have to go to the big named schools to become those things. You do however need to be yourself, and that’s something that the school system cannot teach. They can’t teach us how to become the best us.

So what do we teach then, if we can’t teach you how to be you? What teachers could be providing students with more information on, are things like how to file your taxes and pay bills, or how to detect an internet bug. Skills that these students can actually take outside of class, and apply to their everyday lives. If we take real life skills and provide students with the tools in order to further develop these skills, we can open up more opportunities for creativity and expiration for these young minds to further their education in the career that they want to pursue