After 13 Years in School, What Should Every Student Actually Know? 5 Practical Subjects We Don’t Teach Enough
The first time I asked a tenth grader to plant a lettuce seedling, she held it like it was a strange animal. “Which end goes down?” she said. I pointed to the tiny roots, and she looked genuinely surprised that something that small could become something she had seen in a supermarket. We were in the shadiest corner of the schoolyard, the soil was dry and full of stones, and I had exactly forty minutes before her next class. That was the moment I started thinking about everything school doesn’t cover.
I’ve been teaching for eleven years, and I’ve watched the same pattern repeat itself. Students can label every part of a cell, solve for x, and quote a Shakespeare sonnet on command. But they can’t tell you what a utility bill looks like, or why their phone contract locks them in for two years, or how to calm down when an exam goes badly and they feel like screaming. After thirteen years in a system designed to prepare them for life, most of them leave with a notepad full of formulas and no clue what to do with their first paycheck.
That afternoon in the garden, I started asking students—and my own two kids at home—what they wished they had learned in school. The answers were startlingly practical. And they made me think about the five subjects that every student should have access to before graduating. Not instead of algebra, but alongside it.
The first is personal finance, in the most boring, specific sense of the phrase. Not abstract theories about compound interest—actual budgeting, rent calculations, the difference between a credit card and a debit card, how taxes come out of your pay and why that matters. When a senior told me she had no idea what “superannuation contribution” meant on her first payslip, I realized we had failed her. Schools teach equations about percentages but never ask students to fill in a tax form or plan a month on minimum wage. It’s not about making kids financially sophisticated. It’s about giving them a sense of what adult life actually costs, so their first mistake doesn’t break them.
The second is practical law. Not the constitution or the court system, but the rules that touch ordinary life. Tenants’ rights. What signing a contract means. What to do if a landlord refuses to return a deposit, or if a car salesman tries to talk you into a warranty you don’t need. Recently, I had a former student tell me he signed a lease without reading it, assuming it was standard. It wasn’t. He paid the price for a clause he never saw. A simple, honest subject called “life law” could cover those moments—how to stand up for yourself, who to call, what counts as a binding agreement. It wouldn’t make anyone a lawyer, but it might save them from feeling stupid when a grown adult takes advantage of them.
The third is food and growing, which is what that seed planting was really about. Around the country, schools are ripping out gardens because they aren’t in the syllabus. But there is something deeply grounding about a teenager who can grow a tomato, cook a meal, and understand where food comes from. It’s not about becoming a farmer or a chef. It’s about knowing that you can feed yourself, that things take time, and that not every valuable skill can be graded on a curve. When you grow a plant from seed to fruit, you learn patience in a way no lesson plan can teach. And that’s before you even touch the benefits for kids who are anxious or stressed—working with their hands, being outside, seeing a result that doesn’t depend on a test score.
The fourth is creative thinking, but not the kind that sounds nice in a mission statement. I mean the messy, practical kind: how to approach a problem with no obvious answer, how to improvise, how to make something new out of ordinary things. Right now, creativity is treated as an extracurricular—something for the art kids or the drama crowd. But every profession needs people who can look at a broken situation and imagine a different way. That can be as simple as a class where students are given a broken chair and asked to fix it, or a prompt to design a better school timetable, or a challenge to explain a difficult concept without using words. The point isn’t to produce little inventors. It’s to teach children that there is almost always more than one answer, and that “I don’t know” can be the start of a good question.
The fifth is career exploration, but not the kind where you take a quiz that tells you you’re a “social enterpriser.” I mean real exposure to jobs and paths that don’t have a clear name. Trade skills, apprenticeships, freelance work, starting a small business. For years, we’ve funneled students toward university as if it were the only respectable destination. Meanwhile, the electrician who fixed our school’s wiring is making more money than half the teachers, and he’s only thirty. Students need to meet people who do interesting, practical work. They need to shadow a nurse, a mechanic, a graphic designer. They need to know that you can learn a trade in a year and be earning while your university friends are still writing exams. It’s not about directing anyone away from higher education. It’s about showing the broad landscape of options, so a kid who hates sitting still knows there’s a place for them too.
None of this is easy to timetable. I know that. Schools are crowded places, and teachers are tired, and every subject I’ve listed is already covered in some patchy way—a cooking class here, a careers day there. But that’s the problem. These things are treated as optional extras, small supplements to the real business of passing exams. They’re not. They are the real business.
I still think about that lettuce seedling. I don’t know if it survived—probably not, given the school’s irrigation schedule. But a few students came back the next week to ask about how seeds work, and one of them told me she had planted something at home. It wasn’t a revolution. It was just a start.
Today, I sat with my own son, who is sixteen, and asked him what he would want to learn if he chose the school timetable. He didn’t say engineering or music. He said, “I’d want to learn how to fix my bike.” That’s not in the national curriculum. But I think about it more than I think about his history essay. I don’t know exactly how we fit it all in, or how we give every kid access to every one of those five subjects before they leave. We’re still figuring it out. But the fact that we’re even asking the question—around a patchy schoolyard garden, in a conversation with a teenager who wants to know which end of a seed goes down—feels like the most honest beginning we’ve got.
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