I AM going to agree with the masses on this one, and say that education is important.
I genuinely believe that if are lucky enough to get an education, then you are pretty much set for life.
This is what I have been brought up to believe. But more recently, I have started to think about all the things that you don’t learn from school, and all of things that you are left to figure out for yourself.
In school, they teach you some of the most valuable things in life, it’s true. They teach us how to read, how to write and how to count. Eventually this moves into reading great works, writing detailed essays and an awful lot of algebra.
Every one of these things are incredibly important (I haven’t quite found the use of algebra yet, but you know what I mean) and we wouldn’t be able to live out our lives the same way if we didn’t have knowledge of the world.
But what about the things that they don’t teach us?
There are a lot of everyday things that I still don’t know how to do. It was only the other day that I actually learned how to lodge a cheque, which if all things go well, is a good skill to learn.
We aren’t taught anything about life in the real world at all. The way the schooling system is structured, you would swear that we were never going to leave it.
Others argue that there are some things that we have to learn on our own, and I totally get that. But don’t we have to go through enough emotional development that maybe getting the odd class on practical real world things might help us all along?
It’s just we already have to go through the emotional turmoil that is finding out who the hell we are; and I think that when we eventually get thrown out the doors of the school, we might need a lot more than algebra to help us along.
What do you think? Do you think that more everyday skills should be added into the school system?
Or do you think that being able to finding the circumference of a triangle is enough ?
Follow Zoë O’Connor on Twitter at @Zobo2402
