Required Courses

Instead of teaching high school kids how to put condoms on cucumbers, here are five classes I think would be invaluable to our little minds-full-of-mush.

1. Public Speaking

One of the most useful, practical courses ever for me was an Intro to Public Speaking class. I took it in what would have been my junior year in college. Because I was on the night-school plan, I was 27 when I learned how to speak in front of an audience. 27! That’s about 15 years of public speaking paralysis I had to deal with in my academic career. Public speaking ranks consistently in the top three greatest fears Americans have. Why not alleviate it with a class teaching young kids to do this effectively and fearlessly? Do it the same way I learned: slow and progressive, building up from a 30 second “Hello, my name is So-and-So” to chairing a debate team. Believe me, done this way, public speaking is painless.

2. Basic Economics

So many people are completely ignorant of basic economics (myself shamefully included to a certain degree). I would venture to say that most young people do not fully understand the United States tax system until they actually begin earning a serious paycheck (and even then, who really understands the tax system?). So many terms are thrown around in the media, terminology that the general public simply can’t define, and because of this various parties can bend and twist their meanings to convey whatever they want to convey. A basic but thorough course does not have to be sidled with political ideology and would go a long way to creating knowledgeable and well-informed citizens.

3. Personal Finance

A high school course in personal finance would probably put the credit card industry out of business. Seriously. Teach 14 and 15 year-olds how to balance a checkbook, create and stick to a monthly budget, understand some basic investing options, recognize the difference between good and bad debt, and know the concept of compound interest. If this was immediately implemented nationwide, in ten years personal bankruptcies would drop 50%, and in twenty years, a generation, it would drop to a level 10% or lower of what it is now.

4. Open Subject Mastery

This is a fun one, a class that would really free students from the stifling rigidity of traditional required courses, and would probably stay with the student a long, long time after he has left the confines of high school. The student is to select one intellectual subject – any subject, really, nothing’s out of bounds as long as it’s tasteful and sufficiently large enough – and simply master it. Proof will be a 10,000 word thesis (about 40 double-spaced pages) handed in the last week of the semester. Any topic from science to historical events to biography to sports to politics and war to engineering to … whatever. Just pick a topic close to your heart, master it, and prove your mastery.

5. My Future History

Not “my” meaning “me,” of course, but the student. Have the student spend a full semester creating a detailed, personalized future plan. Let them daydream, let them explore options – no matter how seemingly crazy – and teach them to create and organize short and long-term goals and sub-goals. Yeah, I know that alleged “Harvard study on goals”, you know, the one every self-help book quotes, where 3% of the students who set goals wound up a gazillion times the net worth of the other 97% after twenty years, I know that study has been debunked. But goals are worthwhile. So is knowing where you want to go. And to know where you want to go, you need to dream of yourself five, ten, twenty years down the road. No one teaches us to do this. And that is a shame.

Well, what do you think? Any other ideas or suggestions?