Taxes? Finance? Communication? These are the life skills that are not taught in school, but many students like you and me are constantly struggling with when we become an “adult.” This is a constant debate between many students and administrations about whether these life skill classes should be taught in high school or it is not needed. I believe that these life skill classes should be taught in high school before the students go out into the “real world.”
One reason why we should teach these classes is that these are skills that would prepare students for real life. In a 2016 Odyssey article, Annie Burdick states that high schools send their students out into life with the knowledge of how to take effective notes and how to solve a math problem. However, they don’t prepare them for jobs, emotions, or tackling taxes. Yes, the academic skills are important, but where would we be without life skills for living life. Burdick, later on, expresses that without these necessary skills, students would not be able to have the knowledge to enter adulthood and make difference for their community and the world. According to an article on Macmillan English, they explain the benefits of these life skills for the individual, employment, and society. Some of these benefits are having ways to make an important decision, having the potential to lead in a work environment, and having the ability to network with others in times of need. As you could see, there are benefits of having these life skills taught in school for preparing students.
Another reason why high schools should teach life skills classes is that many students want to have these classes available to them. In 2014, Amanda Ripley published an article in the New York Times about a survey she conducted on high school dropouts and their reasons for dropping about. She found that 25% of American teenagers, who drop out, left school because they did not see the point of attending school. To go into this research further, half of the students thought that the classes they were taking were uninteresting and for every five students, four wished they had more opportunity to do real-world learning such as learning these life skills. This shows that many students want these life skill classes to balance out the boring classes they are taking in which they are seemingly not interested in. Referencing back to a previous article I introduced, it starts the article by saying many high schools have these life skill classes but there is never enough room for students to take them or fit them into their hectic school schedule. With this information, it furthers my point that these students want these classes to be offered to them at their leisure. In the 2016 Huffington Post written by Dr. Carol Morgan, she states we might not use the information that we learned in our other classes such as history or calculus unless we become a history professor or engineer in the future. We would most likely use the life skills we learned in more opportunities for internships and other things similar instead of the Pythagorean theorem.
A third reason why schools should offer these life skill classes is many times parents are unable to teach these skills to the children. Dr. Morgan explains many schools assume that these skills will be taught to them at home by their parents. However, she argues about the notion that many of these parents may be unable to teach these skills to their children because of how they live their life. For many parents, they might be living paycheck to paycheck on the edge of bankruptcy or have poor communication skills. These are not the skills they would want to teach their kids. They want their kids to live a better life than them and not struggling to find a good-paying job when they are older. This might also be the reason why many parents might not want to teach their children about how to live a life like them.
A fourth reason why we should teach these skills in school is that people think that these skills are easy to learn but they are not easy to learn. Referring to an article, I introduced earlier, Dr. Morgan states people believe life skills are soft or easy to learn. However, she believes that the soft skills are the most important things that children will be taught compared to the things that they learn in school. I believe this is true because these are skills that we will carry with us from now until adulthood. We would continue to need to know how to communicate with others as well as doing different tasks to go through life such as balancing a checkbook or how to have a balanced diet. In addition to these skills being called “soft” by many, Dr. Morgan also communicates that life skills should be thought to people early on in life to establish these skills early. She believes we should learn this early because she wants the people who are learning it to know what to do when the skill is needed later on in life. She also expresses the idea that learning these life skills early in life is an easier process to do younger than to do older because it is hard to establish a habit and eliminate a bad one.
Even though the idea of teaching these life skills in school is important, there are also reasons in which why we should not teach students these skills.
One reason why people believe we should not have classes is it does not allow students to take courses that would help them pursue their future. In 2016, Matt Server published an article in The Daily Nebraskan. He states we should not have life skill classes, because the academic subjects that we are currently learning would help us for our career compared to these unimportant lessons we should learn. He also states that these core subjects reflect basic knowledge about these subjects that could lead to potential career opportunities. According to Great Falls Tribune, Lizzie Thompson agrees with this idea. In her article, she expresses life skill classes limit the number of helpful classes students can take towards the career they would want to engage in in the future. Both of these authors believe that having these classes eliminate the subjects that would help us in getting a job in the future.
Another reason why some people believe we should not have these life skill classes is it is the responsibility of the parents to teach their kids about life abilities they would need. According to Lizzie Thompson, she states it is not the school's job to educate students about life skills, but it is the parents’ responsibility. She continues on by explaining we should instead have classes that parents’ necessarily cannot teach to their children unless they have a degree in that subject like how to integrate a function. If we do not have classes that would teach us these skills, we would be unable to learn about it from a source that is not particularly strong in the subject. She then goes on by saying these classes are a waste of tax dollars and of the students’ time and energy. Thompson supports her argument by saying that taxpayers should be unheld responsible for these parents who are not teaching their kids about the life skills they need to survive the real world. She concludes her articles by expressing this class is not going to get you far in life, but the experience and advice you will receive from your parents and other helpful adults will get you farther in where you want to be compared to any class you will take in school.
With both of these reasons showing we should not have these classes be taught in school, the life skill classes that should be taught are beneficial to the students and could better improve their abilities. If parents lack the knowledge of these life skills to teach their children, the classes are helpful to them, because they have a better understanding and knowledge of these abilities to be a more improved person their generation and pass their improved knowledge to their sons and daughters. Instead of removing the important academic subjects we need in school, we could try to incorporate into the everyday lesson we are currently learning. For example, in English class, we could incorporate the topic of communication and networking into a lesson about how to write a professional letter to a person in a higher sector.
After researching about whether schools should or should not teach life skills to their students, I believe that having life skills are important to have for students. The reasons why we should have these classes is because they would prepare us for life, many students would like to have these classes readily available to them, many parents are unfit to teach these lessons to their children, and people think these classes are easy to learn even though they are not. There were also standpoints about why we should not have classes. The standpoints are it would not allow students to explore subjects that would help them in their career and is the parents' job to teach these skills to their children. From all these negative standpoints, there are also positive explanations about why we should have these classes like incorporating them into the everyday lecture and having them available to the students for the parents who cannot teach them these skills. This is why schools should teach life skill classes to their students before they entertain adulthood.