[Source](https://www.pexels.com/photo/planner-and-pens-on-table-with-laptop-4559555/) I have the quadratic formula still in my head. Why? No clue. I studied it in junior year, applied it in one test and that was all. Never came up again. However, that it is occupying my brain.
That is pretty much what school is all about. Study something, pass the exam, forget about it. Next chapter, same thing. You repeat it until you graduate and find that you do not know how to do anything.
No one had taught me how to deal with the rent when I am out of money and the rent is due. Or how to get a breakup that is unexpected. Or what you are supposed to say when a friend is going through a terrible time and you want to do something but you do not know what to say.
We did acquire the periodic table though. So that's something.
I am not saying that all we were taught was worth nothing. Reading and writing matter. You need basic math. Historical knowledge prevents you being an idiotic person about the world. However, somewhere it became this where grades were everything. Just get the A. Just pass. It does not matter whether you know it or not and whether you will ever put it in to practice.
We were learning dates of wars and never discussed what to do when you are the problem in the relationship. We heard about mitosis and not how to notice when you are being manipulated by someone. Shakespeare was analyzed to death, but nobody said what the young man was to do when he was twenty-five and had no idea what to do with his life.
Mental health? Forget it. That wasn't a thing. You simply played with you whatever you felt during your personal time. Stressed? Normal. Anxious all the time? Just push through it. Completely burnt out? Well, everyone's tired. None of us were taught to understand that there are situations when your mind requires assistance, or that it is not a sign of weakness to speak out that you are not alright.
Life is not accompanied by instructions. There is no formula on how to know whether one is in the right career or wrong relationship. Those choices can not be studied. And a majority of us are simply throwing darts at it hoping that we will not bamboozle ourselves.
That's the disconnect. We can take any exam that you give us, but make us prepare a meal or do some taxes or have a tough conversation and we melt. We're lost. We are already aware of all this haphazard stuff but the fundamentals of what it means to be an adult were simply not taught.
Suppose they had made a bit of time over to actual competencies? How to manage money. Communicating in ugly situations. The ability to identify when one has to quit something. How to be a failure without being ruined by it.
I don't regret going to school. However I believe we were cheated slightly. We were taught all but how to live. Learning to live with not knowing it all. How to treat people and ourselves decently.
We were rote learning formulas as though our lives were at stake. It turns out that the stuff that actually counted did not get on the test.