It's always the same old story. Go to school. Learn English, math, history, science, and the searing pain of social rejection. Go home. Forget everything you learned. Most of the things learned in a typical school curriculum not only fail to prepare students for college and the real world, but they're also cripplingly, almost criminally, boring. If schools would agree to teach subjects like these, both students and teachers might find themselves a little more engaged:
Film Making
Making films is a cool means of self-expression. Not everyone is cut out for blogging or playing an instrument, and the world has more than enough bad poetry as it is. Films have become a part of our everyday lives, from big-budget blockbusters to amusing no-budget clips on YouTube. Teaching students to make more effective videos is not only good for keeping students interested in their lessons, for once, but it also means that there will be more high-quality content available in the future. The entire world will thank you for that.
Job Hunting
At around age eighteen, students will graduate from receiving six hours of taxpayer-funded babysitting per day and be thrust out into the real world to fend for themselves. Some of them will delay entry into the work force by obtaining a few years of self-funded babysitting at university, but the end result is the same - they need to be able to find a job. Rather than allowing hordes of students to list their PlayStation high scores on their resumes and wear pyjamas to their job interviews, it would be in everyone's best interest if students learned the ins and outs of convincing someone to hire you while still at school.
Money Management
Yes, maths is taught in schools. No, that kind of maths isn’t doing anyone any practical good. You will never need to do coordinate geometry while paying your taxes, and you'll never have to work with radians at the grocery store. Unless kids are fortunate enough to have been brought up in a rare household that isn’t bad at literally everything pertaining to money, they're going to have a rough time once they’ve been cast out of the academic womb. What percentage of their monthly budget should go to rent? How much money will they have to make in order to avoid sharing a tent in the woods with four other people? For kids who’ve never faced greater financial responsibility than paying for their own video games, these are the great mysteries of life - and they shouldn’t have to be.
Social Skills
Despite popular belief, people are not born with perfect social skills; they learn them. Some children are graced with interactive families and plenty of cheek-pinching relatives to teach them good manners early on. Other children are allowed to spend most of their time alone, slowly reverting to their evolutionary roots as they build dens and discover fire in the basement. Even the most well-adjusted child is going to have some tricky situations to deal with in life. How do you cope with a co-worker who steals credit for your ideas? What are you supposed to do when you want to break off a relationship with someone who hasn’t really done anything wrong? How do you deal with a roommate who won't pay his share of the rent on time and keeps a stolen baby rhinoceros in your bathtub? A few classes on social skills could really help students to navigate these unavoidable situations.
Practical Mechanics
From oil changes to shattered screens on an iDevice of some sort, there are plenty of quick fixes in life that you should know how to do yourself. Sure, a computer technician will always be there, happy to take your $100 in exchange for running a can of compressed air over your fan and evicting the family of deer mice living underneath the motherboard, but you can save a lot of time and money by doing it yourself. Everything you ever buy will break at some point, and many people have lost the skills needed to un-break them. Sure, you can tell kids to struggle through with an instructional YouTube video and a fork for most home repairs, but it'd be far better for them to learn it properly.
