When you’re in high school the one thing you hear from the second you set foot on the campus as a freshman is, “Let’s talk about college.” There’s no simple way to ease into it, and there’s no way around it, there’s only, “What are you planning to do after high school?” And, “You’re going to need this in college.” That’s what high school is about, preparing kids for a college education that they will be lucky to acquire or even afford in this economy.
Of course, teaching kids is a must, yet why don’t we prepare them for jobs? For the taxes Americans handle with daily? Is there a reason no classes are about how to fill out a resume or create a checking account? Should we not give students a clear view of the reality after high school? They will probably be with their parents or move in with a friend, once they both have the money to afford a small apartment even.

Then, there comes the challenge of getting a job with only a high school diploma; something that doesn’t get you very far in this job world. Many places of employment do require a minimum of such, but the one’s that actually pay you a decent yearly wage are the ones that want you to have a college degree. How will we get a college degree while working and trying to hold ourselves up? It’s a simple cause to effect scenario that many teachers and teens seem to overlook. What’s a high school student to do with so many people telling them to do something they may not be able to accomplish?

High school should be about preparing students for what will happen if and when they cannot manage college with work or not afford it. The teachers should be teaching us how to do our taxes, pay bills, and proper interview etiquette for when we go in for a job. I believe that the Pythagorean Theorem can wait while we discover how difficult it is to live in society without our parent’s paying for our insurance, without a “free” home to live in, and without people paying for our basic wants and needs. We don’t need the scientific method if we’re stuck working construction for $3.50 an hour. What is there we need to know about the Byzantine Empire if we work retail at our local Wal-Mart?

High school is the last guaranteed years we will be in school. Four years that fly by so fast, you get whiplash. These four years should be helping us prepare for the world of adulthood we stumble into carelessly because we don’t know how to any other way. Our parents don’t hold our hand and help us like when we first learned to ride a bike, they stand back and watch us ride it without remembering they too were like us and they also fell off that bike when entering such a new and strange stage. In reality, we’re freshman all over and in a new form of schooling whether it be the workplace, college classroom, or even simply figuring out how to go about setting up a bank account.  Would you want to stumble into the world of adulthood carelessly, or with knowledge that carries you gracefully?