Public schools never prepare you for real life

Public schools skip life skills lectures on purpose. No personal finance or self-reliance. Just obedience to the state. Here’s why that’s by design.

If public schools really prepared kids for life, then explain this: Why can’t many graduates explain how compound interest works, how to budget their paycheck, or even how to change a flat tire? Why can’t they navigate a mortgage, start a business, or understand how to keep debt from swallowing them?

The truth is staring us in the face. Public schooling’s designed to make students dependent on banks, corporations, and, above all, the state.

The missing curriculum

Go ahead, look at what’s required and what ain’t.

• Personal finance? Optional, if it even exists. But somehow students are expected to enter adulthood signing binding contracts, credit agreements, and take out student loans with zero training.

• Household maintenance? Forget it. Plumbing? Electrical safety? Budgeting for groceries? Nowhere to be found unless they enroll in a trade school.

• Basic car care? Maybe an elective in “auto tech,” but no requirement. Yet people depend on vehicles daily, and breakdowns can make or break employment.

Meanwhile, these courses are treated as extras, as though knowing how to survive in the real world is a hobby rather than the foundation of adulthood.

What do they require and why?

Instead, public schools force-feed kids the same “core” classes, most of which they’ll never use again unless they chase a niche career. Algebraic proofs? Analyzing Shakespeare’s iambic pentameter? Memorizing the Krebs cycle?

Sure, those things may broaden the mind, but that’s not these schools’ endgame. They care about compliance and standardized test scores, not self-sufficiency.

They want students who can regurgitate information on command, not citizens who can walk out the door and live without hand-holding.

The state’s in the business of manufacturing obedient citizens who need the state to survive. And if you think that’s hyperbole, just ask yourself: Why would any sane system not make personal finance mandatory if they cared about preparing kids for life?

Cui Bono?

Who benefits from this engineered ignorance?

• Banks and credit card companies. Financial illiteracy is the best customer acquisition strategy ever invented. People who don’t understand interest rates may happily sign their lives away.

• Corporations. Workers who lack basic self-reliance can’t imagine starting their own businesses, growing their own food, or charting their own path. They’re chained to the job market.

• The state. Dependent citizens are loyal citizens. They’ll beg for student loan forgiveness instead of questioning why they were never taught to avoid predatory debt in the first place.

Central planners can’t create prosperity, but they can cripple people to ensure dependence on authority. That’s exactly what our education system does.

The alternative vision

Imagine if schools actually taught for life.

Math would be grounded in budgeting, investing, probability, and taxes (hopefully sniffing out tax loopholes). Literature would emphasize spotting propaganda, not parroting symbolism.

Science would focus on nutrition, energy, and problem-solving. History would strip away state-approved myths and focus on cause-and-effect—not worshipping central planners.

And above all, self-reliance would be treated as the highest good, like knowing how to manage money, cook a meal, fix a leak, or diagnose a car issue. Those skills make free individuals, not serfs.

But that kind of education threatens the institutions that run the system. If students walked out of school knowing how to live independently, they wouldn’t need the handouts, fall into corporate or state traps, or bow to bureaucrats pretending to be saviors.

The mic drop

Let’s be brutally honest: public schools refuse to teach life skills. The absence of practical education’s the design.

When you don’t know how to manage your money, you go into debt. And when you can’t fix your own problems, you look to corporations or government agencies to fix them for you.

And when you’re conditioned to obey bells, schedules, and authority figures for thirteen straight years, you walk out into the world ready to follow orders.

Independent, self-sufficient individuals don’t need bureaucrats. And that’s the last thing the state wants.

My motivation for The Arcane Prophecy

Yote Diamondback exited the traditional schooling system in my YA fantasy, The Arcane Prophecy, and was in for a culture shock when she learned the Arcane Elemental Academy never had any bells, homework, grades, or even classes where students sat and took notes for hours on end.

But you know what? Arcane showed her how effective an alternative system was, since the kids attending the school loved it, unlike what she’d been used to in the past when nobody wanted to be in school.

In The Arcane Prophecy, the school becomes a character, as does the anarcho-capitalist Northern Region where it resides. Check out its first three chapters now, and discover a different kind of fiction that doesn’t play to cookie-cutter YA standards.