The American School System is Broken and Detrimental

I will present my case, and then refute yours. FYI - I am not talking about College, I am primarily talking about High School and some other things before it. 1) *In High School, we are not taught any information that is relevant or will benefit us in our current lives, and we are taught a lot of utterly useless information that we will forget.* Prior to about 10th grade, we are given a lot of good tools for a lot of jobs we could get in High School and even adulthood. After that point, we are taught insanely complex math, little details about science, and other things that we will only forget later on unless we pick a career in which we actually use that specific info. I think that's it good to have a general understanding about the world, but a lot of the tiny details from science, history, mathematics, etc are neither immediately useful, nor will they be used later on. Not all of us are going to go into chemical engineering or some other insanely complex field of science. In fact, the reason some of those positions pay so highly is because not many people do them; the quantity is scarce because of how much effort, memory, and understanding of complex math, chemistry, and physics is required to do them. People don't want to do them, so they pay others high amounts to do it for them. 2) *Hardly any of the information we learn around the High School time is immediately useful in our lives.* We should be given a fair amount of exposure to all sorts of subjects, not just the four core subjects that are required. While some of the childhood development in the USA is based around academics so that we can get a good job in the future, hardly any of it is actually useful in childhood or teenhood. SOME of it is, don't get me wrong; we need good grammar/communication skills, math for money purposes, and an accurate understanding of science for health reasons as teens. The thing is, after we've learned all we can that will actually be useful in our current stage of life, we are continued to be exposed to more information which we aren't using regularly. You know what they say, "If you don't use it, you lose it." I could tell you all about quadratic formulas, algebra, and electronegativity, but I can't tell you a lot of basic things that I learned in say, 4th or 5th grade. I really can't tell you much about history either, because it won't help me personally, nor will it help me in a realistic situation. It *MIGHT* (notice I said MIGHT) help me in a future job, but there's no way to know for sure. In addition to having a relatively diverse amount of exposure to some good future-job material, *we need to know information that will help us in our teen years of life.* We need to learn about how our minds work and how we develop as people; so many teenagers are so obviously struggling because they don't know how to resolve issues. We also aren't taught a lot of other good things. I saw a tumblr post awhile ago, that said: "Things I Never Learned In High School *How to do taxes *What taxes are *How to vote *What political parties are *How to write a check/balance a check book *Anything to do with banking *How to do loans for college *How to jump start a car or any basic emergency things *How to buy a car or house but I'm so glad I know the f**king Pythagorean theorem thank you" Quite frankly, I don't give a crap about this information, it will become of no use to me and I will COMPLETELY forget it when I actually have a paying job. In the words of Peter Griffin: 3) *We are given too much exposure to a very small range of subjects.* We aren't given a diverse enough range of things to learn about, and things we are given to learn about, we get so specific in and we get to such a difficult level, that really, we should be asking: "Why DON'T most teens hate school?" INSTEAD of, "Why do most teens hate school?" We're being forced to learn useless things. (Useless to us, not those who actually want to go into those sort of fields.) Quite frankly, it sucks. 4) *This point addresses people who say "We need to expose kids and teens to these subjects so that they'll know whether they want to have a job in that kind of field or not."* Ladies and gentlemen, there are far better methods of teaching teens about these fields without exposing them to mind-numbingly complex equations and facts that we could forget later on. We should give teens and kids MODERATE exposure to those fields, rather than making them go so deep that it causes stress to remember and do some of the content. Additionally, they should CHOOSE what they want to delve into further. There should be a minimum requirement for the amount of things they must delve into, but after they've learned about a certain subject, highly dislike it, and don't want to have a job involving said subject, there should be no reason to force them to further investigate that subject. *HOWEVER, IF THEY WANT TO, they SHOULD be allowed to revisit the subject* once they get a little further into school and say, "Hey, this is hard, but I might be able to make a great living off of it. 5) *We are taught one thing in High School; how to pass the standardized tests.* We're not taught how to build a life, or get a good job; think about how many college graduates are unemployed. Once we pass the tests, there usually isn't a reason to remember the info, because it won't always be relevant later on. Granted, I'm not talking about BASIC information, I'm talking about insanely complex things. Once we pass, we're free to forget the information, and it makes no mark on our lives other than boring us to death. 6) I'd like to send you this clip for Sherlock, and the people who wrote the script make a great point: REFUTATION: 1) Spending large amounts of money on something, *IN ABSOLUTELY NO WAY*, implies any quality whatsoever. There are so many things that people have spent tons of money on but don't really have much quality whatsoever; take, for example, much of the modern movies and music being pumped out to the masses today. Considering how broken I've shown the system to be, something tells me that they're *overspending*. However, overspending by our government leaders is nothing new. 2) Standardization is harmful, like how I stated in point five of my arguments section above. It's a standardized set of highly useless information, that's all. The purpose of school is supposed to help us support ourselves financially and build a life, and it fails tremendously in doing so.