Schools focus on academic knowledge and teach students to memorize information, and gives them extremely low chances to learn critical life skills. Schools focus on preparing them for universities, but not for jobs and real life. It doesn’t teach them how to manage money, how to negotiate, how to communicate. It doesn’t teach personal growth, emotional intelligence and positive thinking. Also, not all parents are qualified to teach “life” skills to their kids and schools would have been great to provide the same standards and skills in a universal way.
Of course, students need math, algebra and geometry. But every course stays within theory. That doesn’t teach them skills for financial success, money management. Students don’t learn how the stock markets works, how investment or insurance really work in real world. Students learn geography and history, but they don’t really understand the current world and it’s complex geopolitics.
Another example is that no curriculum in any schools offer programming for students, although these skills became part of the world’s most demanded jobs. Hence, we start seeing some Programming boot camps here and there, or independent private coding schools focusing on this. But of course these are formats that aren’t accessible for all students in a fair and standardized way.
Teaching real-life skills should be mandatory in schools. We believe that schools must prepare all students for success by giving them the skills they need to become productive adults, and make sure they are equipping the tomorrow’s workforce in an efficient way.
Here is what uknak would have loved to see changed, and we would love to hear from our community as well:
Happiness, positive thinking, and resilience classes:
What is Happiness, Positive thinking and resilience? How can you practice these skills? How to show gratitude?
Recognising and utilising character strengths:
What are our strengths, why are they important to detect? How do these skills help in moving forward?
Mindfulness:
How to be aware of breathing, How to be present and calm? How to feel good? How to recognise your feelings?
Emotional intelligence:
What are emotions? how to recognise positive and negative emotions? How to deal with negative emotions?
Relationships and Communication:
Why building relationships is an important skill, and why good relationships matter? What are examples of good communication ?
Money Management:
How to talk about money, savings, financial goals? How to explain opportunity cost ? Why impulse buys is harmful? How to be content and responsible?
Psychology:
How to let go upsetting feelings, How to appreciate good experiences? How to relax? How to practice self-observation, and self-reflection.
We hope that teaching these life skills would start sooner than college. Not everyone goes to college and universities, but everyone needs to know these skills.
We also hope that in our uknak community we have coaches, teachers and experts that can take the time to design and customize these suggestions towards their own students.
Let’s prepare our kids for life, not for standardised tests!
Check our original Blog post on www.uknak.com
https://uknak.com/school-do-not-prepare-us-for-the-real-world/
