Forty years ago, people expected 2017 to look a whole lot different than it does now.
People thought there would be flying cars, robot butlers, and time travel. While flying cars and robot butlers are definitely in the making, the one thing that seems almost impossible is the ability to time travel.
I’ll be the first to admit that time travel would be pretty cool. I could go back and correct all of my wrongs, see my dog again, and relive special memories. However, the one thing I would not do is go back to high school. As a college student, I often hear people talk about how “high school was the best four years of their life,” or “if I could go back to high school, I would in a heartbeat!”
My response: LOL I can’t relate.
High school gave me amazing friends, a few quality teachers, and maybe some useful skills to apply in college.
What high school didn't do: prepare me for the real world.
Many of the teachers—if you could even call them that—that I had in high school always claimed that what we were learning applied to the “real world” and that it would be “useful in any line of work." Anybody care to explain how “Johnny buying 42 watermelons” is a real-world example (unless you are a watermelon enthusiast)? Or how making a pinch pot is useful in any line of work (other than in professional ceramic work, of course)?
As an aspiring journalist, none of these things apply to me and I can guarantee if you ask other people from high school they’ll tell you the same thing. I remember talking to my mom and telling her that I felt like there wasn’t a point in going to high school because it didn’t help me with anything I needed to know to prepare me for real life.
Things that I felt I needed to know before going off to college consisted of knowing how to do taxes, how to budget on an income, or even how to pay off debt. I learned none of this in high school, and now that I’m in college, I’m having to figure it all out on my own while simultaneously trying to focus on school work, clubs, and so much more. To me, high school offered some of the basic necessities, like friends and material to get to the “next level”, not things that I believed would guide me in the real world.
Education is extremely important, and I understand that students need to learn about a variety of fields to find their career path, but they should also be taught how to live in the real world—and not the “real world” where Johnny buys 42 watermelons.
So, when some amazing scientist finally creates a time machine and gives people the ability to go back to the past, I will gladly go relive my sister's wedding, play fetch with my dog, and maybe forgive some people that I hadn’t before.
But I will not go anywhere near that high school.
Who knows? I might even travel into the future and see if the Jetsons' predictions were right after all.