By Brian Hughes ’15

We have all been there before. You sit in class while the teacher drones on, until suddenly the loudmouthed girl sitting at the back of the room shouts, “When are we ever gonna have to use this?!” It seems to be a growing argument among the group of students who scoff at the idea of paying attention and learning something in the classroom.

Recently, I have begun to understand this argument, one brought up by those who fight the system in the form of pulling out their phones or leaving the room instead of sitting through a social studies class, because it’s not as if history teaches us about mistakes we shouldn’t repeat or why international relations are the way they are. That being said, I have taken it upon myself to recommend new courses to Sherwood’s administration that would supplement real-world skills students can actually use to enrich and expand their minds in order to navigate through the dark world they know nothing about.

Students will always complain about school not teaching them enough about how to manage their finances. A great way for today’s kids to get ahead of the game would be to learn how to launder money. The economics classes, for example, could be redesigned to teach students the ins and outs of Bitcoin and Dark Wallet to keep their money safe from taxes, or maybe to hide from the law their money trail pointing to illicit actions they had to commit because they aren’t capable of holding a real job.

Here at Sherwood we should also reinvent the communications class, in which students would learn to network with corporation heads and build up a contact base. Seniors, for instance, could pick up ways to schmooze admissions officers at the colleges they applied to into accepting them over a golf outing, mainly because their grades are subpar as a result of not paying attention in the other needless classes that have no application to the outside world. Again, it is a skill more applicable to real life than any grade that gauges your intellectual ability.

Now let’s say there are some kids who actually got to the level where they can afford to run their own business. Too bad they never learned how in high school. I’m all for schools training students to take advantage of resources and maximize profits. Take the entrepreneurship class, for instance. It could be molded to fit in time for students to venture out and hire young children overseas for a few cents an hour to build a product or deliver a service that the students developed in class. You know, real world stuff.

But above all else, it’s English classes that really hurt students. Putting more emphasis on the ability to recognize and understand satirical writing is what will benefit students at the moment.