How do you do your taxes? Or manage a checking account? Or set up direct deposits at a bank? What even is a mortgage? I couldn’t tell you, but I could tell you how to find the area of circle or recite to you the quadratic formula or the Pythagorean Theorem.

Luckily, if ever a situation arises where I need to come up with the length of the hypotenuse in a matter of seconds I will be A-Okay. So what if I end up owing the government a lot of money because I don’t know how to do my taxes? At least I will never be left wondering whose faces are on Mount Rushmore.

Don’t get me wrong, learning about science, math, English, history, and a little bit of everything else is fantastic and important and we should keep teaching those things. However, schools should still come up with some sort of system to supplement life skills. Instead of drilling the lessons on the Civil War or the Renaissance into us every year, maybe one time it could be substituted for a class that teaches students how to write checks and fill out tax forms and how to eventually buy a house.

Knowing who the 36th president was is a great skill, but when you go into a bank for a mortgage loan, no one is going to care. It won’t matter that you can name all fifty states, it will matter that you have a good credit score, and that you even know what credit score is. High school doesn’t a pretty awful job at preparing you for the “real world”, and college doesn’t do much better.

People have this idea that once you get out of high school, college with teach you everything you need to know about how to succeed. However, you still only take economics if you are a business or accounting related major. College lacks the same courses high school lacks; you still won’t encounter a class that teaches you how to be a functional adult in society. No wonder people joke about not being able to “adult.”

High schools take most of the blame for not teaching life skills, but college is supposed to be the gateway to the real world. College is where you should become confident in your ability to live on your own, but it still doesn’t provide you with the tools to do so. The education systems is lacking when it comes to life skills, and something should change so we can stop raising generations that are dependent for far too long.