By Nathanael Simeon
Research done by the University of Anglia, U.K. states that students entering college were only able to recall 40 percent of the teachings that they had just spent 12 years of their life studying. So what is the point of spending all those years knowing that 60 percent of the information is bound to become a forgotten memory?
Instead, state and national education leaders should focus on curriculum that includes skills applying directly to what the kids will need to know in order to pursue a career and live a healthy and productive life.
The broad range of subjects that high schools teach should be narrowed down to focus on what kids will need to know depending on the career path they choose. This will ensure that students are fully prepared when advancing to the next stages of their life and going into college. With under 40% of students starting their first 4-year college program actually graduating from college, the rest are left to drop out because they were unprepared. They start a major without the right knowledge needed of what to expect, resulting in a poor performance and eventual drop out. If high schools spent more time educating students about different career options and the information they would need to know, students might be better prepared for when they actually get to college and have to engage in these topics and skills.
Information taught in high schools does not always apply to real world situations, so students easily forget the information. Vital skills such as paying taxes, investing, and dealing with your savings are all things students will encounter at some point in their lives, yet these subjects are rarely touched upon in school, or if they are just for small pockets of students. young people growing up end up financially unstable. This leads to young adults relying on their parents for too long as shown in a recent study by the Pew Research Center, where 33% of 25-29 year olds lived with their parents or grandparents in 2016, which is three times the amount it was in 1970.
The number of adults who are still living with their parents at such an old age is the highest in been in 75 years. This is the result of financially uneducated kids coming out of high school who aren’t taught the skills of investment or managing taxes and debt, so they do not acquire the funds needed to be on their own. Not knowing these skills that should have been taught during their time in high school, make it a longer road to financial independence which in turn means more years in their parents basement.
The common idea to justify the traditional high school curriculum is that it expands the knowledge of students, giving them a solid base with experience in a wide range of topics, which helps them be familiar with a grander scale of ideas. However, attempting to learn all these different types of information at once results in thinking to be more difficult and makes your brain undergo a heavy strain. This makes it impossible to remember all the subjects.
In Dr. Joanne Cantor’s article “Flooding your Brain’s Engine,” she explains how “even though we can store virtually limitless amounts in our long-term memory, we can only keep a small amount of information in focus at any given time.” She also goes on state how “We just can’t juggle dozens of ideas at the same time,” similar to what is asked of students in high school. Taking in mass amounts of information all at once makes it difficult for your brain to learn anything in-depth and therefore does more harm to the academic goals of the students, than good.
It’s time for state and national leaders to make it a priority to address at least the basics of what is needed for students’ future careers and life skills. Doing this would result in a higher number of college graduates. And just imagine how much more advanced our society would be if rather than only 40% of students graduating college on the first try, we had closer to 100% of them.