Changing The School Curriculum

Magy Gatherum

Rita Calvan

ELA the spoken word

14 April 2015

Students from kindergarten to the end of college or grad school are taught things that will not be important in their adult life, these years are spent forcing unnecessary subjects on students. They need to learn things that can help them out when they are an adult. This causes people to not know what or how to do stuff as adults like parenting. schools need to change the curriculum, so that it doesn't have things we don't need to know as mandatory courses.

Even social media has been pointing this out! A YouTuber has been steadily increasing views and subscribers after his song "Don't Stay In School" in which he wrote this on the description: "I can't remember feeling so passionate whilst writing something in ages. I absolutely love a lot of things I mention in this - astronomy, particle physics, pure maths... but I hate that everyone is forced to learn them. It should be a choice. There are a million other things wrong with education, but this one stood out to me as the most obvious and most insane" -Dave from Boyinaband. That very song was front paged on the controversial page of reddit, had over 1000 shares on Facebook and reached over 1000000 views on youtube, It sparked participation from viewers too, multiple YouTubers began to create "reactions" to the song. A High school student on Ted.com called out this issue as well, he said: "Tell me why I need to understand and learn Calculus, or even parts of Biology and History that has no relevance to the Real World. I'm very frustrated with this, please clearly answer why I need to learn what I learn." Even though there are so many examples, some people still don't agree with this.

Lots of people (teachers, parents, students, etc...) feel that students are taught things like advanced mathematics and biology so that we can prepare them for jobs like this in the future. Many people believe that this is important because there is a lack of people in fields like science and maths. This can be true in some ways, but forcing subjects onto students can make them relate these jobs and subjects to bad experiences (being stressed out, overwhelmed, etc...). Besides that, we need to teach everyone things that can apply in real world situations.

The majority of students will have to deal with depression (either theirs or a friend's) and the school curriculum does not how to deal with these things, which eaves them to be out on their own to deal with this. To quote the songwriter mentioned earlier (Boyinaband AKA Dave)"Could we discuss domestic abuse and get the facts Or how to help my depressed friend with their mental state?Ummm... no but learn mental maths Because you won't have a calculator with you every day!"When students are adults there are some courses that they can take on parenting, but for some people, it could be difficult to find time for, or even sometimes to pay for, so this may not for for quite a few people.

All the time in school students are told "Everyone needs this in real life" but not many people actually do use these things in real life, the answer is, most of the time they don't. This however, does not mean that these courses should not be offered, kids are curious, they may want to learn about these things just for themselves, if they actually do wish to become things like scientists then they will take up classes that relate to their interests.

On top of that, many teachers use "helpful" websites such as No Red Ink or Front Rowed, which can be useful after the student completes their in class work or projects, but if teacher do decide to assign projects or in-class work, then the time given in class should be used for things like that, otherwise, students could fall behind in major projects that take up more of their grade, and even still, these projects most of the time will still not help students in adult life.

Although a lot of projects and assignments in school are not useful, there are some things that are taught that are important to know like reading, writing, and basic maths, there are even some project assignments that can help students figure out their views and interests for their field of job, or to figure out what things they are for or against, these can be things like essays of sorts, and some maths and science, things like argument papers can even motivate students of all ages to try to make a change in things that matter to them, this however, does not mean that all students should be focused on is things from these subjects.

Overall, schools should teach classes valuable to the majority of adult lives, but many schools actually do this, instead students are taught things that are not valuable to their lives or get put off of jobs that include school taught academic subjects because of pressure or stress that schools provide. We still should be taught these things just not as mandatory subjects, the mandatory subjects should include things that will apply to people's real lives.