HS education

Looking back on my high school education, I remember that it was mandatory to take a government class your senior year. That class taught me about the structure of the government, mostly the basics, and some of the fundamental laws of the country. That was it.

Were were the classes that teach you how to get involved in the political process? Where are the classes that teach you what the laws are in your town/state/country so you know how to stay out of trouble? I would rather sacrifice some of the other courses we have in school and teach our future minds some of the basics on how to get along. We do this with sex/drug education, but not with a lot of the other basics.

We train our young people in math and science, literature and art, but not in the basics of starting a business, how to do your taxes, managing personal finance, how to invest money in the stock market or your own business. If we want to unleash the growth of our economy, we need to empower each person to develop their ideas. If people feel overwhelmed by the basics of the system, because nobody taught them, then they will have to spend their time figuring out those things instead of developing their ideas.

Knowledge has been and will only more so continue to be the determinant in economic prosperity.

But it has to be the right knowledge. A college graduate with a fine education in science and literature may not be as economically profitable as a post high school grad with a few years of real-world experience, simply because he does not have the context, the knowledge of the system, in which to apply his knowledge and come up with ideas. I am not saying that everybody needs to be an entrepreneur, only that every individual is a more effective part of the machine if they understand their place in that machine.

If every individual has a better understanding of how the system works, because many aspects of it are becoming more and more standardized, than they can make the personal decision about where they fit in that  system. As the last mandated education, high school students should be exposed to a barrage of real world information AND they should have access to that information for reference after they graduate.