High school is supposed to be a time for students to explore their interests and gain knowledge for their futures; however, this goal isn’t always achieved. Schools today don’t properly teach their students necessary knowledge for their future. High schools need to place more emphasis on practical, and real-life-applicable classes like personal finance and rhetoric and persuasion, so that students  can more easily succeed in their lives after high school. 

Personal Finance is a class that provides students with the ability to budget their own money, understand how credit cards work, how to do their own taxes, how to apply for a mortgage or a loan and all about credit scores. These skills are ones that should be required to learn, yet are not and deemed subordinate to core classes like English, social studies, math and science. 

Not only are these essential financial skills undervalued by schools, but another very useful skill, public speaking is as well. 

Staples offers a public speaking class that assists one in becoming a confident, effective public speaker: Rhetoric and Persuasion. This class isn’t mandatory, and public speaking might not seem like a critical skill for someone to learn, but many jobs nowadays require public speaking. It exponentially increases your likelihood for success, and if a school’s main goal really is to properly prepare students for the future, this skill should be prioritized along with personal finance. 

The more knowledgeable one is about these real life responsibilities and skills, the easier and more smoothly their transition into adulthood will be. This gives them the opportunity to focus on other important, new aspects of their life. 

Staples offers Rhetoric and Persuasion and Personal Finance, but they aren’t mandatory for their students to take, and many students don’t get a chance to take it. Instead of adding these classes into a student’s schedule, Staples requires their students take classes that only fill up space. They mandate four different types of social studies classes; one of which is a repeated category of social studies class that students have already taken. This space that the extra social studies class takes up could be easily replaced by Rhetoric and Persuasion and Personal Finance. Every class should teach students beneficial information, not just fill space.

Instead of teaching only some students these skills, high schools should teach them all. Personal Finance and Rhetoric and Persuasion need, and are capable of being added to the list of skills Staples, and all high schools for that matter provide. These will be the most beneficial courses given to students at Staples for use in their future; thus, there needs to be more emphasis placed on them for the benefit of the students.