When I entered high school as a freshman at a public school in North Carolina, everyone was required to take a class entitled 'Life Skills.' Being the apparently naive 14-year-old that I was, I thought this meant a class on learning basic finance skills, such as how to open a savings account, how mortgages work, and how to pay taxes.
Here is what it was in reality: we spent a day practicing writing checks (as in, practicing handcrafting our signature about 20 times on a piece of paper with photocopied checks) and the rest of the class was made up of the teacher making us read terrifying stories about how if we have premarital sex, we will get an STD, and if we drink and do drugs, we will aspire to nothing (disclaimer: if I were to estimate, I'd say about 90 percent of the class participated in these activities anyway over the course of high school, proving just how much of a waste of time it was). But here's the funny thing—not everyone is going to listen to someone who is telling them not to have sex or do drugs, but everyone, at some point in the future, needs to know how to buy a home, how to save money, and how to open a banking account. Crazy, right?! Clearly, to the person that came up with the curriculum for that course.
I am not trying to say that teaching students about the dangers of drugs and health-related issues is not important. However, this kind of education is usually already ingrained in our brains early on. Most middle schools already require a course on sex education, drug education is usually touched on in 8th grade, and driver's ed classes spend an extended amount of time on the dangers of alcohol, so it becomes redundant to spend the whole class time on it. But middle school is too early to teach students about finance, at least according to most public school systems. So why are we not teaching students about it in high school in a class titled, ironically, Life Skills?
In my opinion, the curriculum should be flip-flopped: spend a week on sex and drug education and spend the rest of the course teaching students about basic finance skills. I was fortunate enough to grow up with an accountant in my house (Thanks, Mom) but not everyone is this lucky. I see too many college students now that have no idea how to handle money in the real world. That is sad.
The problem with devoting a curriculum to sex and drug education is that a majority of people have already made up in their minds whether they are going to listen or not—I strongly believe that a course trying to repetitively scare them will not change their minds. Let's reevaluate what we are teaching students in school and how we are allocating our time. In the public school system, the course Life Skills (or whatever name it is given, depending on the school) has great potential to prepare teenagers for the future, but right now, it isn't doing it. Let's change that.
