Louis:

Who can find the velocity of a rolling cart, write a five paragraph essay on any pointless topic and describe DNA replication step-by-step? This guy. Who doesn’t know how to balance a checkbook, cook a real dinner or pay taxes? This guy.
Don’t get me wrong, school is great. Though more often than not, students find themselves thinking, “When am I really going to use this?” That’s a problem. While our school does an excellent job in providing an assortment of classes that you can choose to best fit our needs, most high school students are still unsure of what they “need.”
The majority of students don’t know what career they plan on pursuing. Even after graduation, some people are still unsure. How should you know if you need to take Calculus if you don’t know what career you want? Calculus is great if you plan on being an engineer but is almost useless if you want to be an elementary school gym teacher.
Basic skills, like knowing how to balance a checkbook or pay taxes, are relevant regardless of your career. These are things that, unlike calculus, everyone needs to know. There are a lot of things you learn in school that you’ll probably never need to know. For example, history is an excellent topic, but will an engineer really need to know the year Julius Caesar died? Unless they happen to find themselves on a game show, then they most likely won’t.
High school does its best to give students a general education and to help prepare them for whatever career they choose to pursue. Some students (myself included) get so caught up in getting good grades that they forget about trying to get an education. Although Freedom offers an accounting class, busy students who are trying to build up an impressive transcript for college don’t have room on their schedule to worry about a class like that.
When you go to college and you don’t have Mommy to cook for you, what happens when you get hungry? Most students just throw a chunk of Ramen Noodles on the stove. While it is both easy and cheap, Ramen is not always the healthiest choice of food. Freedom used to offer a Home Economics class up until this year (due to lack of interest, it has been removed). If you think about it, cooking is something you’re probably going to use every single day for the rest of your life.
You could say that it’s the parents’ job, not the school’s, to teach teens how to cook. That is great and all, but in the modern day, a lot of kids live with a single parent who is just too busy to teach them to cook.
So, what is the problem? Is it that society is pushing students to learn things like chemistry rather than cooking? Is it students lacking an interest in these areas? Maybe students are pushed so hard to do their best and focus on a future that still may be undecided that they don’t focus on more basic skills.

Gigi:

There comes a point in your education where your parents are not able to help you with your homework anymore. Though some subject matter is exactly the same as when your parents were younger (addition and subtraction), the way that students go about learning today is significantly different due to the widespread use of technology.
Both of my parents continued their education beyond high school, yet I can’t ask for them to help me with my calculus homework. They did well when they took this class in school, but the majority of this knowledge has left them, for they do not use it on a daily basis. However, my parents can teach me how to cook, clean and balance my checkbook, for these life skills are used regularly.
Not everything can be taught to us in school. It isn’t the job of the teachers to show us how to make our beds in the morning. Though some might enjoy taking a cooking class, others who already have obtained these skills might view it as a waste of time. Cooking is something that can be self-taught by using the Internet and other resources. Then, there is the argument of, “Someone can teach me how to write an essay on the Internet.” Though this is true, how many of you would actually sit down and learn how to write essays? If this wasn’t something taught at an earlier age, I would be one of those people guilty of never learning how to write. Everyone is not going to teach themselves how to write an essay, which is crucial if they are planning on continuing their education. The new technology has helped to speed up the rate at which we are able to learn. I have learned so much outside of school by using the Internet as a tool. Because the school provides everyone with a laptop, there is no excuse as to why students should not be able to look up the steps necessary to fill out W-4’s. Eventually, everyone will be forced to figure out these “life skills” if they really are necessary to survival.
I understand that many parents are busy and do not have time to sit down with their children and teach them all of these life skills, but we are not the only generation that has had to face this problem. Going back to prehistoric times, cave people figured out how to cook because their survival depended on it. However, they had no clue what atoms were. We are improving as a society in terms of our knowledge. Teaching students about new discoveries being made and discussing different viewpoints about the world is more beneficial (if the goal is to become a more knowledgeable society) than taking a class that teaches everyone how to pay taxes.
I am not opposed to these classes being offered at Freedom, and I think it is great if students take them. If there is room in your schedule, and you have the opportunity to take it, that is wonderful. If the whole world didn’t know how to cook, there would be serious problems. However, it is not the responsibility of the school to offer these classes, especially considering all of the budget cuts that have recently been put into effect. If everyone only knew how to cook, pay taxes and balance a checkbook, we would not be living the same lives that we live today. I strongly believe that if students must make a choice between taking a core class as opposed to a cooking class, the core class should have priority.