400 years, that’s about how long the school system has been around. With so much time, you would think the system has been perfected but it still lacks so much. It lacks to teach the necessities you need to know in life, limits kids creativity, and does not prepare for the future that is coming. Yes, the curriculums have changed through the years but they still stay roughly the same. 

Despite the few/limited courses that some schools offer, the school fails to teach about the financial aspect of life. For example taxes, loans, IRAs, credit, retirement accounts, and life insurance are crucial subjects everyone needs to know about and be educated on in order to have a better chance at living a successful life. But does the school teach us about these essential skills? No, it does not. Many young adults are thrown into life without knowing about any of these skills.  They are having to learn the hard way how to deal with them. Yes, sometimes parents are capable of teaching these subjects but not everyone has parents who know enough about them or don’t care enough to teach their kids. Not teaching about this in school is setting up a lot of kids for failure in the future. They teach us so many unnecessary topics that a lot of us won’t need in the future like how to solve for x or the Periodic table but they fail to teach us what we will all need. If a young adult doesn’t know these things, they can get themselves into debt they can’t pay off, not get approved for big purchases because of bad credit, or even legal troubles if they don’t pay their taxes. It’s a snowball effect of troubles not knowing these skills.  If the school has time to teach us information half of us will most likely not use, they should teach us the information we do need. 

The one thing schools have taught us throughout our lives is that the best way to be successful is to stay in school, get good grades, go to college, and get a good job. It’s been programmed in our heads for so long that that is the “best” way, but it’s not. So many of today’s most successful people haven’t gone to college or dropped out of school, because they wanted to take a more creative road to success. While there are some important careers such as doctors, lawyers, and teachers that require certain skills taught in school, there are so many other ways to be successful than to just work a 9AM-5PM job. Many kids growing up have an artistic idea of what they want to do in the future, but as time goes on their ideas often get shut down because their creative way isn’t the “safe” way. Doing something different and creative is risky and isn’t guaranteed to work out, which is why a lot of parents or schools push kids to stay in school and just get a job. By doing this, they are only limiting kids from doing something that makes them happy. A big concern is that the different or creative approach is not going to provide a stable enough life for them, such as income. Many famous artists, singers, and actresses dropped out of school but were able to reach their potential. But income isn’t everything to everyone. For some people, doing what they love is more important than the money they make, the house they live in, or the car they drive. Schools should encourage kids to make more creative choices or provide more resources for kids to use their creativity. 

With all this being said, the school system should be re-evaluated. It doesn’t have to be the same that it’s been for over 400 years, it can change. If they took more into consideration what would benefit us more in the future and did not try to control us so much, everyone would be a lot happier.