Twenty Things You Won't Learn in School

There’s a lot of stuff that you don’t learn in school that is really important in order to get by in the world. Here is a list, in no particular order, of 20 skills that I never learned in school (although I may well have picked some of these skills up along the way) and I suspect most other people don’t, either. Certainly some of these skills are required to get by in school, but instructors often assume that people will pick them up almost magically.

  1. How to feel good about yourself and be happy. Most people consider this to be very important, yet a lot of people aren’t happy, so it seems like a lot of people could benefit from learning this.
  2. Interpersonal skills.
  3. Verbal communication skills.
  4. Living in a democracy, how to determine whom to vote for, how to be involved, and the like.
  5. How to decide what is right and what is wrong. In olden days, people would get these lessons from parents, churches, and the like, but not anymore, with the result that they never really learn how to decide what’s right and what’s wrong, and so there’s a lot of immoral people out there.
  6. How to decide what values to live your life by. Similar to the previous point, but, while the above point refers to the decisions made on a day-to-day basis, this point relates to making long-term decisions about how your values are going to direct your life.
  7. How to decide on a purpose for your life.
  8. How to find meaning in your life.
  9. Critical thinking. This is taught in many universities and sometimes in high school (although not while I was in school), but it doesn’t seem that it’s always effective.
  10. Cognitive biases This is a relatively recent discovery in the field of psychology, which may explain why people don’t learn about it in school.
  11. How to use your brain to the limit of its potential. The human brain is capable of incredible feats ofcreativity, discovery, calculation, memorization, visualization, and the like. The people who perform these feats generally are not of genetically superior stock, so it would seem likely that we could teach people how to use these skills. Perhaps you won’t find this in school curricula because we don’t know exactly how to do this yet.
  12. How to detect change. This isn’t something that humans are good at; most people only notice change afte it’s happened, and they then say, “Wow, things have really changed.” What this point refers to is noticing the process of change itself.
  13. Learning skills such as study skills and time management. I guess we just assume that, because someone is doing alright in school, that they’ve mastered these skills. There’s always room for improvement, though.
  14. How to learn, especially how to learn independently.
  15. A love of learning. Most children are naturally curious and love to learn new things. It doesn’t take long for school to put an end to that.
  16. How to be creative. It’s hard to teach true creativity in school because a lot of school consists of teaching kids not to be creative, to do what they’re told. Even when schoolchildren are doing something creative, it’s only a sort of ersatz creativity.
  17. Developing the intuitive mind. This can be hard to do in a traditional classroom, because the intuitive part of the brain is developed through having real-life experiences, not sitting in a classroom day after day.
  18. How to choose a career. How to make a good career choice that really fits. Most career choice stuff done in school involves filling out questionnaires and getting results, which doesn’t mean much.
  19. How to make decisions.
  20. How to select friends and other important people in your life.

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