Does School Really Get You Ready For Your Future?

Source: https://nhoetnews.wordpress.com

The economic principle I will be exploring is: Institutions are the “rules of the game” that influence choices. My research question to help me study this principle is: what do schools prepare students for? An article written by Sarah Knopp called “What Do Schools Produce” talks about the reasons why the school system does things a certain way. Sarah helps demonstrate my economic principle by showing how schools prepare us for the real world and how that affects students. 

 Knopp tells her readers that the school system is designed to get “future workers ready for their jobs”. She explains that schools want their students to be prepared to have to do things they may not always want to do. She is basically saying that school makes us good workers by giving us several subjects and lots of work so we can learn how to stay on track with everything and be able to do things that we may not always enjoy. This is something we’ve all known for a while. We know that it’s our schools intention to prepare us for our jobs and the real world...or does it? As a student I know that I would enjoy school much more if I could focus on one thing at a time. 

Since school has been done a certain way for so long I understand that it would be hard to change it. But sometimes I wonder if school was done in a way where you could choose your classes and if there were more classes required where you can learn about mental health and how to pay your bills. Because that, to me, is the real world, not pretending and learning things that I may not use later on in life. 

 So rather than teaching us to do things we may not like why can’t we choose classes that we do like? Although I understand that school’s intention is to get kids ready for the real world, it doesn't cover everything we need in order to do what we are interested in. For me I’m interested in being a therapist and I didn’t get the choice to take psychology.  Some kids might be interested in things that they don’t get to practice in high school and instead they have to do things they may not be as interested in, but after all that’s what makes us good workers right? 

 The next research question I will cover is: What schools do things differently to make school better?