Does your school prepare your child for the real world?

Can the school you are taking your child adequately prepare your young one for the real world? Does it prepare your young ones for the changing working life with all its stresses and gains? Or are they only prepped up with multiple certificates that you know well mean nothing in the world? What about finances, taxes, accounting, survival skills, empathy and community? Are these part of the preparations

Are our teenagers today prepared for life after school? Or are they simply too coddled? These are some of questions that many parents are asking today with respect to their fast growing children. Although many parents advocates for schools to teach more real-life skills to their students, including a basic understanding of the metric system and a more realistic approach to sex education, many are still wondering if enough is being done to shape the skills of these young ones to meet the ever aggressive global market.

There’s a lot of discussion about modern youth being supposedly less ready for adulthood than their parents’ generation. It seems that the modern youth is less ready for adulthood than their parents generation. As a result, the cases of femicide, suicide, mental illness among many more have become rampant all over the world. There are some differences from one community to the next, but the general case is that we are failing in one way or another. When you consider other factors like the rise of social media, multimedia and the intercultural conflicts that may happen online, many parents have pointed their fingers to the education system.

In a society where children are handed everything, we have ended up with the youth who never go above and beyond. There is no drive to standout or to go the extra mile. Their parents don’t challenge them enough to be the best versions of themselves. The more privilege parents are wondering what to do with their youth having spoilt them for long enough, while the less privileged ones are struggling with the thoughts that they were never available to inspire or even challenge their youth to stand up for better in the future. Given the economics of today unlike in the past, the youth are less likely financially stable than the previous generations. For there simply aren’t as many opportunities as there were previously.

Do schools have a responsibility to fill in the gaps when parents don’t educate their children about basics? Absolutely!! Whether it is the old/new 844 system or the incoming Competencies Based Curriculum or the British / American systems, these should be working together to raise educated students. Meaning of educated is students who are knowledgeable about the world around them, even when the parents slack off. It should be a joint effort between parent and educator to train the next generation of children to be independent and prepared for what’s ahead.

The world has becomes so dynamic that many courses offered in schools and colleges have become irrelevant in the business world. The University of Nairobi admits to this and will be scrapping off some 40 courses. And this is just but the beginning. For many graduates, if they were to be thrown out into the real world, the general opinion is that they would not know how to handle themselves. There’s a sense of responsibility and maturity that come from having a job which they lack. When someone puts their head down to achieve their goals by themselves, as an independent adult, their outcome will reflect what they learned in both high school and college. Take for instance, there’s a great need for a pragmatic approach to sex education in schools. And this is not just singling it out reproduction as a subsection of sex education, but that we need to develop sex education as part of the emotional and physiological development of both the boy child and the girl child.

However, it is impossible to talk about the efficiency of our schools without touching on parenting and the parental support for the well-being of the students. Parents make the school and they determine the kind of environment the students get to learn from. Indeed, in the ideal sense, the school should be a follow up of what the parents have taught at home. In our current establishment, we should see a case in which the classes that students take would be based on two main components: what students are interested in, and what students will need for their lives after graduating. Sometimes, there are classes that we don’t necessarily like but are required to take because they teach things that are needed out there in the real world, or provide a better basis for the rest of a child’s learning career. However, it is proven that when a child is enjoying the class, they are more likely to absorb the information. If there is a particular subject or teaching style that a student likes, that’s information to act on.