Did you know that the average American uses only 37 percent of the information they learn in school? According to a recent study by H&R Block, more than 80 percent of adults have learned skills they’ve never used. In other words, the vast majority of high school graduates have little use for anything they learned in school. That means that nearly half of their education was worthless. But what if you could take some of that information and put it to better use?
The most useful things you can learn in high school aren’t academic. If you are smart enough to apply math to the real world, you can use algebra. Of course, this isn’t true for everyone, but many people still use this skill. You don’t have to know much about economics to make a living, though. High school students should focus on learning how to balance a checkbook and calculate rent and food expenses. This way, they won’t be burdened with all that useless information.
Many students dream of being experts in something, like engineering or world history. Yet solving the focal point of a hyperbola doesn’t seem to have any relevance in their lives once they graduate. But it seems that a high school curriculum geared towards this goal tends to be unhelpful. Besides, not all students want to go to college. Moreover, the “holy grail” of learning is being an expert in something. However, in the case of high school math, the emphasis on expertise over usefulness is glaringly obvious: arithmetic leads to algebra, which includes numerous twists and turns that most people don’t even use. Finally, geometry leads to calculus, an entire subject that hardly anyone uses.
