Public High School Research Paper

Wake up, get ready, go to school, extracurriculars, come home, repeat. Day in and day out, that is the basic schedule of an average high school student. Students spend an average of seven hours a day in school, so what are they learning there? Here is a list of some important life skills that you will not learn from your public high school:

How to properly use money. How many times have you had to write a check in your lifetime? What about visiting the bank? Well, you can forget about this generation knowing about finances, because the public school system would rather have them learn about parabolas. But that is perfectly fine, you will probably need to use the quadratic equation more than you will ever have to pay taxes.

How to remember information

to apply to something besides a test. Will this be on the test? This is one of the most common sentences to come out of a high schoolers mouth, aside from, “Can I go to the bathroom?” or “How bad will this drop my grade?”. Who could blame them? Since the law No Child Left Behind passed in 2002, students take as many as 20 standardized tests a year, not counting the countless number of quizzes, tests, exams, progress checks, and finals that go along with every class. Cramming for three tests a night is the usual, but that will have to wait until practice is over and the student gets five minutes to eat.
How basic government works. Where do you register to vote? Where does the actual voting take place? Did you know that when you graduated high school or is that something that “you just have to learn on your own”? There are 30 basic human rights written out by the United Nations. Can you name them? Neither can most students. I guess it’s not that important, it’s not like it would be important to know that everyone has the right to life and to a trial.
How to perform basic first aid. Mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell. Well, that’s great but how do you stop someone from bleeding out of a cut? What if someone is choking? Knowing how to perform CPR, how to clean and dress wounds, how to prevent infection, how to use a tourniquet, and perform the Heimlich maneuver could save your or other’s lives. But knowing about the obsolete drawings of atoms is definitely more important.

Many would say that students are just lazy and would prefer to do no work while they attend school and also that this difficult, pointless work is “good for us”. However, the current education system only teaches to pass tests. A study at the University of Maryland showed that “teaching for the test” leads to, “declines in teaching higher-order thinking, in the amount spent on complex assignments, and in the actual amount of high cognitive content in the curriculum.”