I’m sure the mere mention of the word ‘school’ probably brought back some memories for you. That’s bound to happen as the time spent in school is some of the most special in a person’s life.

Knowledge is what separates us from the rest of the species on the planet and school is literally the place where we go to acquire it, right since our childhood up until adolescence.

From learning the alphabets in a language to being able to tell the height of a building just by the length of it’s shadow, we learn a plethora of things in school. Some of those things are really important in life while most, really aren’t!!

That’s correct. I’m sure you don’t remember 99% of the things you learned in school as life has a completely different set of problems that you are simply never taught about in school. Let me just mention some of these here.

Critical Thinking

Except for mathematics, I think most subjects in school aren’t designed to train you to think critically or logically or even creatively. Instead, they expect you learn a bunch of useless facts and pour it all in your exams.

Basically in exams, they are not testing your intelligence but rather your memory power which is funny because the internet has rendered that skill useless as you can search for any fact within seconds.

What is not obsolete however is the ability to come up with creative solutions to really difficult problems in life or at work. I guess that is why most people struggle in this area.

Doing Your Taxes

While you probably learn why you need to pay your taxes, you don’t learn how to do them or when and how to file your taxes or the various rules and regulations that come with the whole thing.

This is really important because not paying your taxes or not paying them accurately could get you in trouble regardless of the fact that you had memorised a 10 page essay on the Roman Empire in school.

In fact, doing your own taxes is so confusing for a lot of people that they simply hire professionals to do it for them.

Finding A Job

School not only serves as a place for acquiring knowledge but also as a training ground for preparing students for the next part of their journey in life i.e. work.

Yes, we do learn the necessary things that could help us in carrying out our jobs efficiently and effectively but finding the job itself is something that we are never taught anything about.

Students need to be taught how to pursue the jobs that they care about, how to apply and build their resumes, how to handle the many interviews that they will be subject to and what it means to be a working professional.

The Value of Failure

This might differ based on the country you belong to but where I’m from, failure is seen as shame. Right from the childhood, we are brought up in a culture where failure just isn’t an option.

Then we grow up and listen to these really successful people in history who all stress that failure is actually really helpful in life and can be seen as blessings in disguise. Failures are the real teachers of life.

Even in school, you are punished for making mistakes rather than being encouraged to learn from them. I get the disciplining part but they should also teach the value of failure rather than making you believe it is just not an option.

Time Management

This one is really ironical. When you’re in school, you often need to handle a multitude of things at the same time. You have your assignments of many different subjects, some contests to prepare for, some sports even to participate it and so forth.

Still, one never quite learns about time management and it shows in how we deal with life after we become working individuals. We struggle to make time for the various aspects of our jobs let alone for other important things outside of it.

This has resulted in an “always busy” lifestyle where we miss out on a great deal. I think if we were taught basic time management at school, we would be able to do a much better job at life.