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Schools Stuck in the Past
Chris Travers
St-Thomas High School

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High school curriculums are not teaching students skills beneficial in the future. Firstly, the amount of out of school work given is not realistic to what will be given in the real world. Secondly, certain classes are a waste of time in the day, which could be taken outside of school. Lastly, the grading system does not accurately measure how a student will succeed in life. The amount of homework given in high schools today does not represent the work given in a job or a career. Students only care about getting the work done and on time instead of learning the skills and information given from the work. In the real world, a job/career as asked of someone to go to work first thin in the morning and proceed back home in the late afternoon or early evening. In high school it is asked to go in the morning and leave in the afternoon in the same way, but in this case student will have to complete on average two to four hours of homework each night (Miller, 20110). It is known that students are given more homework now then they ever were, and there are more consequences of that other than just not having enough time for other things. In primary school, the younger students are known to be happy and have good morale. As the student’s get older and reach grade five or six, they have less and less optimism about school. The main reason for that is the increase in homework. Disliking school is only a small problem compared to health that accompany the stress of being a student. Stress comes along not just with emotional and physical symptoms, but behavioral symptoms like procrastination, or even increased use in alcohol, drugs or cigarettes (WebMD, 2013). The intention for homework is certainly not to get students addicted to smoking, but is to help learn 3
What being taught in class. Why must students do this at home, when it can be done at school where there is a qualified teacher present to help and answer questions? As an adult, almost all work is done at the office or wherever one works, except for rare cases when some paperwork is done at home which may only happen a few times a year, while students do it every day. Meanwhile, certain classes are a waste of time during the school day, and could be taken outside of school. Playing a musical instrument, knowing how to cook and acting are all things that are important to know how to do. If someone has no interest in learning how to do one of these things, why do schools offer these subjects as classes when they could be taken as extracurricular activities and be replaced by classes, which could benefit the future of students? For example, a class on managing money that teaches how to pay taxes, take out a bank loan and pay off a mortgage properly. Schools could be teaching subjects which are beneficial for real world situations. Even in the so-called “important” classes like math or science, students are being taught almost useless information to memorize or how to plug numbers into formulas. These thing that they are learning can be easily accessed at a job on anywhere simply by looking it up on Google. Most of these option classes are chosen by students simply to boost their overall average marks. Students may chose classes like fitness because they are in shape, guitar because they already know how to play, or cooking because they already know how to cook. They take these classes with the only intent to sail by without doing much work and make their report cards look somewhat better. Given that there some option classes that
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do provide students with real world knowledge like law and leadership, but there are only limited spots for the classes and students might be forced into other, less-beneficial classes. Classes, which could be taken outside of school, on the students own time. Finally, the grading system