10 Things You Need for Adult Life but Don’t Learn in School

2. Time Management Skills

You gotta learn how to handle your time.
You gotta learn how to handle your time.

Even though exams, papers, tests, and assignments are required at certain times, many educators don’t take the time to teach students how to ensure they can meet these deadlines. Effective time management skills are needed throughout life. This is true for future jobs and even future relationships. After all, no one likes to deal with someone who is consistently late.

While there is no question that time efficiency is helpful in school, it is also more important as a person gets older. After all, the older a person

gets, the less and less time they have until retirement. It is also extremely important as a person attempts to navigate retirement plans, family, and raising children. Scheduling effectively gets more and more important in these situations. Also, sleep is typically less important as a person gets older and the use of calendars and alerts on a smartphone are extremely helpful in keeping up with everything that has to get done.

Schools need to offer basic time management skills for kids at all ages, which can help them increase productivity as time passes. However, there are many kids entering college, and even their first jobs, that don’t have the basic time management skills needed to keep up with tasks at work, in college, with their family, or anywhere else where this type of skill is needed.

1. A Healthy Sense of Skepticism

Be more skeptical.
Be more skeptical.

This type of school curriculum would include ideas such as why everything most people believe is likely wrong to some extent; why memories are unreliable; how fields that seem sturdy, such as physics and mathematics, are full of uncertainty; how everyone is a terrible judge of things that made them happy or unhappy in the past and what is going to make them happy or unhappy in the future; and so on.

Skepticism is important because almost anything that is good in life comes from a sense of uncertainty or a state of not knowing. In fact, uncertainty is what drives a person to become curious, to want to learn, to test new theories and ideas, and to communicate their intentions to other people. This is also what helps to keep a person humble and accept what comes along in life. It can also allow you to see other people without biases and unfair judgments.

Virtually anything in life that is bad comes from certainty: unfair prejudice, bigotry, arrogance, and complacency. Schools need to teach children a healthy level of skepticism early in life, or they may become the next generation to fall in and drink the cyanide-laced Kool-Aid like people in the past who blindly followed someone did.

Skepticism helps to cultivate the ability to open oneself up to alternatives, to challenge yourself, to question things, withhold judgment, and make yourself an overall better person in the long run.

Conclusion

School – both high school and college – teaches students quite a bit. In fact, it offers some important skills. However, as a person approaches adulthood, there are certain skills they need that are not on the traditional curriculum. Understanding what skills are necessary and how these are beneficial in life can help a student, as well as their parents, understand why additional education is necessary.

In most cases, the skills listed here are ones that parents can instill in their children. However, if this is not possible, a student needs to take the time to learn them on their own. Failure to do this may leave them lost later on in life, without basic life skills that can help them become a more successful person.

There are some, more enlightened colleges, which have caught on to the trend of teaching basic life skills; however, these institutions are few and far between. As a result, it is often up to the student to learn these skills on their own. Doing so can help them become a more well-rounded individual, who is not only able to take care of themselves, but also achieve more in their future jobs or careers.

Take the 10 skills highlighted here, read them, absorb them, and then take some time to learn what they are all about. Being a well-rounded person requires that a student understands more than just geometry, physics, and life science. The basic skills of life encompass much more than just what is taught in the traditional classroom. Understanding this and taking the time to learn skills that are not offered in the classroom is the best way to ensure a person is well-rounded and prepared for whatever life throws their way.