codyg1985’s Think Tank

A study concluded that students at four-year universities and community colleges lacked the ability to perform important tasks such as understanding a contract.

The study measured the ability to do three common tasks: read and comprehend the articles of a newspaper, perform the math necessary to balance a checkbook, and understanding legal documents.

The public school system does not teach real-life skills to students. Sure a student will do much with reading comprehension and mathematics, but the problem is that the style of math and reading that is taught to students does not prepare them for real-world situations.

A student in the public school system will start out by learning the number system, and how to perform the basic math operations. After that, however, a huge amount of emphasis is placed on algebra instead of the math that one would encounter when filling out a tax form, computing the right amount for a tip, or balancing a checkbook. No amount of algebra or calculus will help in either of these situations.

Reading comprehension is not so much a weak point in the public school system, but, again, the style that is taught in schools is not that that one would encounter in the real-world. Reading many ficticious short stories, poems, and novels will not help to develop the skill required for one to understand the terms of a contract or a lease agreement, to name a couple of examples.

If the public school system does not teach these skills, then who should? Colleges usually don’t take up the task because they assume that students already know how to handle the real-world situations. Public schools don’t teach these skills because it is assumed that parents will teach the student how to handle the situations. Unfortunately, some parents think that the school should teach these skills. It is not an easy solution; schools have other problems to worry about when it comes to “book learning” as it is; it would only make things more complicated if all of a sudden school also had to teach real-world, “street smarts” to students as well.

So, the best thing is either to let the parents teach these skills, or learn yourself…sometimes the hard way.