11 Things Students Did Not and Will Not Learn in Highschool

Got this from my friend Ana Tess.

Pur­port­edly from the great Bill Gates. But a lit­tle sleuthing uncov­ered the fact that it is an excerpt from the book “Dumb­ing Down our Kids” by edu­ca­tor Charles Sykes.

In any case, if this was from Bill Gates, it’s a lot bet­ter than the speech he made at Har­vard. :-)

I love the way this list does not sug­ar­coat life after school. At the same time, while it seems to indict edu­ca­tion for its being too unre­al­is­tic, a mid­dle ground needs to be discerned.

“Down from the hill, down to the world go I…remem’bring still, how the bright blue eagles fly…” are words we sing at the Ate­neo. I think it is a good reminder of what the role of school is in our lives. Edu­ca­tion ought to pre­pare you for life–to be able to go “down from the hill and into the world”. But one of the academe’s role is also to put up a mir­ror to society–to a soci­ety that often­times fails (or maybe doesn’t have time?) to reflect–so that soci­ety will be able to think more deeply and more clearly about what it is doing.

Yes, we can be dumbed by edu­ca­tion, and some­times, we think that life is all about what we see in school. But if we think about it, that is pre­cisely one of the roles of edu­ca­tion as well–precisely to show what is ideal, pre­cisely to put up a stan­dard; so that soci­ety will begin to see how far it is from that stan­dard. And hope­fully act accordingly.

Edu­ca­tion, by its very nature, is aspi­ra­tional. Some peo­ple might insult the acad­eme for being too idealistic.

But what is a soci­ety with­out ideals?

11 Things Stu­dents Did Not and Will Not Learn in Highschool

Rule 1 : Life is not fair — get used to it!

Rule 2 : The world won’t care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accom­plish some­thing BEFORE you feel good about yourself.

Rule 3 : You will NOT make $60,000 a year right out of high school. You won’t be a vice-president with a car phone until you earn both.

Rule 4 : If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss.

Rule 5 : Flip­ping burg­ers is not beneath your dig­nity. Your Grand­par­ents had a dif­fer­ent word for burger flip­ping: they called it opportunity.

Rule 6: If you mess up, it’s not your par­ents’ fault, so don’t whine about your mis­takes, learn from them.

Rule 7: Before you were born, your par­ents weren’t as bor­ing as they are now. They got that way from pay­ing your bills, clean­ing your clothes and lis­ten­ing to you talk about how cool you thought you were. So before you save the rain for­est from the par­a­sites of your parent’s gen­er­a­tion, try delous­ing the closet in your own room.

Rule 8: Your school may have done away with win­ners and losers, but life HAS NOT. In some schools, they have abol­ished fail­ing grades and they’ll give you as MANY TIMES as you want to get the right answer. This doesn’t bear the slight­est resem­blance to ANYTHING in real life.

Rule 9: Life is not divided into semes­ters. You don’t get sum­mers off and very few employ­ers are inter­ested in help­ing you FIND YOURSELF. Do that on your own time.

Rule 10: Tele­vi­sion is NOT real life. In real life peo­ple actu­ally have to leave the cof­fee shop and go to jobs.

Rule 11: Be nice to nerds. Chances are you’ll end up work­ing for one.