School should do more to prepare students for the non-academic aspects of adulthood.Write a response in which you discuss the extent to which you agree or disagree with the recommendation and explain your reasoning for the position you take. In developing

Education is certainly the hot-button issue of the moment, with national policies like Race to the Top and No Child Left Behind changing the way we teach, measure academic success, and even learn. At the heart of the debate over the future of education is the question broached in this prompt: are academic subjects, such as mathematics and history, more worthy of students’ time than life skills, such as critical thinking, ethics, and self-expression? Many refuse to let go of the system of rote memorization and strict quantitative evaluation that has long characterized education in America, yet in a fast-paced world characterized by huge systemic problems and constant seismic shifts in science, business, and technology, this system is no longer functional. Adulthood is primarily non-academic, and school is meant to prepare students for adulthood. Thus, schools should indeed do more to prepare students for the non-academic aspects of life.

At the heart of the recent financial crisis was the proliferation of sub-prime mortgages, in which people without any capital were able to procure a mortgage the payments of which they would never be able to afford. How were so many people hoodwinked by predatory loans? It is because their education, in spite of all of its math classes, did not prepare them in any way for the mathematics of the real world. What use is calculus, which only a tiny subset of students will ever use in their lives or jobs, in comparison to lessons in reading contracts or investing intelligently, something that every person will need to do at one point or another? It is not too extreme to suggest that if our schools spent more of their time focused on finance as it actually affects people’s lives, the crisis could have been avoided, or at least significantly mitigated.

And non-academic skills are as important on the micro level as they are on the macro level. I attended a private school in Seattle, Washington with a firm focus on mathematics and science; we were required to take both a math and a science class every year, and most of us were encouraged to take AP and honors classes in these subjects. While there is something to be said for working outside of your comfort zone, the intense attention paid to academics came at the expense of those subjects that most interested me. During high school, I competed as a concert pianist and performed in professional theater productions in Seattle. Like me, the vast majority of my classmates did not go into fields involving either math or science, and those years we spent studying academic subjects to advanced levels caused us to lose out on time we could have spent developing passions from which we might have derived joy for the rest of our lives. Studies show that playing an instrument provides numerous benefits relevant to the non-academic aspects of adulthood, such as managing stress, persevering in the face of failure, and maintaining focus.

Of course, many educational theorists argue that the workforce is increasingly being channeled into

either the service economy, comprised primarily of jobs requiring no education at all, and those jobs that require a high level of technical proficiency and thus a specialized academic education. These theorists believe that our only hope of remaining competitive in the world economy is to ensure that our schools focus on academics such as math and science, so that America’s children will be prepared to step into those highly specialized jobs. However, it turns out that even the most advanced tech companies in the world claim that mental flexibility is far more important to their hiring decisions than pure knowledge (much of which they would rather pass on through training on-site, in order to promote their own methodologies). At interviews for Microsoft, potential candidates are said to have been asked the following riddle: “Why is a sewer grate round, rather than square?” The answer is that a round grate can never fall down the hole (a square can if you tilt it up and rotate it into the diagonal). Surely no amount of purely academic education would prepare one to answer a question such as this; only an educational regimen that propounded critical and flexible thinking about real world problems would be of any use.

An academic education is inarguably important. No student should be allowed to leave school without a solid understanding of basic mathematics and the ability to read critically and write coherently. But these skills are merely one part of what makes a well-rounded individual. For too long, American schools have been overly focused on quantifiable metrics of achievement; if we are to compete in the global economy, as well as fix some of the terrible problems afflicting our world, it will be necessary to design a new education premised on preparing students for the lives they are most likely to lead, rather than some idealistic concept.