Читать книгу My Diploma Doesn't Seem to Work: Principles they forgot to teach in High School - Moisés Castillo - Страница 4

School doesn’t teach you everything you need to know about success—at least in life. Now this is by no means meant to dishonor the individuals who work for and with the educational system. Professional educators are amazing people, and they often know how to supplement state-mandated curriculums to give students a leg up in life. But let’s be honest. The educational system is flawed. The average American high school is missing some important subjects in life skills, such as “real-life problem-solving”, “goal setting”, and “achievement beyond grades”. These are the things students need in order to leave a footprint behind when the time comes to kick the bucket.

Students are coming out just as clueless as when they went in, brainwashed into thinking that “going with the flow” is perfectly fine when really only dead fish go with the flow. Get your diploma, go to college, get a degree, get a job, pay into your 401k, retire and die—is that the best we have to offer? I’ve heard people say, “If you don’t know what you want to achieve, you may not achieve much.” So where is the Life Goals 101 class or AP Path to Personal Achievement?

Right…there isn’t one.

I’m not bashing on teachers or faculty or staff. They all had their unique style of teaching, some more effective than others, some more fun than others, and some more passionate than others. That’s not really my point. This is:

Taking that the average life expectancy age is 79, with only a high school education you will have spent 23 percent of your life in school (23%!). If you are going to spend almost one-quarter of your life in a classroom, shouldn’t it teach you something useful to help you through the rest of your life?

It is safe to say that by the time you entered high school, you already established a foundational base of cognitive and deductive reasoning. (You were pretty well aware that when your mother told you not to touch the stove because it was hot, she was right. But if she tried telling you that about the TV remote, you’d look at her like “How old do you think I am?”) If high school curriculums took leadership and finance as seriously as English and algebra, we would produce more leaders and independent thinkers, who would have a plan for the next five, ten, twenty years in the future. Instead we have the Department of Education promoting agendas that aren’t taking anyone anywhere! “We’ve already taken away the Arts. How about we take away a science” “Maybe we should extend the lunch period” “Oooh I have an idea! Let's let students out 5 minutes early but let’s have school start 10 minutes earlier this year!” “Maybe we should extend the school year by a month” “Maybe we should shorten it by two weeks.”

Politics and politicking. Utterly useless for the adults of tomorrow. How about we give a leadership development class, so when the time comes to lead a family, employees or a team we know how? How about a course on taxes so that future taxpayers understand what taxes are, what they are for and how to pay them? How about an investment club that will teach students to think longer term about production, rather than short-term consumption? How about supporting business incubation so that students come out of high school with solid business ideas that will promote financial independence instead of looking forward to retirement? Where are the classes on how to live an extraordinary life?

High school doesn’t teach you that. But this book will… at least get you on the right track toward it.

Wait! No, you won’t find all the answers here. This book is NOT an informational step by step breakdown of the difference between a 1099 and a W2. Or whether you should put your money into a traditional IRA or a Roth IRA. Or how to leverage your credit, or how take money out of your 401k, or where to find a good mentor, or how to approach networking… We’ll get to that (this is just the first book).

In life, you have to learn to stand up before you can walk. This is where we stand up and take control of our own education. This is where we stop blaming “the system” for what we don’t know, and we start to figure it out for ourselves. And here, I will give you some tips on how to upgrade that high school diploma in order to ace life.

This book does not have all the answers. But the answers are out there, and I’m going to help you find them. Socrates said “The unexamined life isn’t worth living.” But how are we expected to examine our lives when we are told to never question the system, go to school, get a job, work for forty years, retire, and finally die? Aristotle answers, “Well begun is half done.” You picked up this book, so you already know there has to be more to this than “they” say. And knowing is half the battle. Even if your diploma doesn’t seem to work, your brain does. It’s just a matter of figuring out who you are and what you want. To sit down and examine your life to see what tools and information you need and figure out how to find it. You’ve already begun. So keep going…