How many high school students know how to budget money, stay out of debt, or pay off a credit card on time? As a high school senior, I don’t know how to do many of these things. The scary part is, the graduating seniors soon will be expected to do these things in the "real world."

Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College, argues that students should get out of school two years earlier in his article "Let Teenagers Try Adulthood." While most students like the sound of that, maybe we should take those two years Botstein wants to eliminate to teach students more practical life skills.

Students should be taught to think for themselves, and people would think that teachers would be doing that, but instead, too much time is spent preparing students for standardized testing like the Keystones, PSSAs, or AP exams. For example, in the New Yorker cartoon "Two Scoreboards" by Edward Koren, the comparison of the two scoreboards (one labeled "Game" and the other labeled "Test Scores") shows that standardized testing becomes a way to rank schools similar to the way schools are ranked in athletics. Because schools are ranked based on standardized tests, teachers and administrators place more emphasis on these tests to ensure their school looks better, but in the long run the increased emphasis hurts students. The students are not being taught to think, they are being taught to regurgitate information. Students not being taught to think for themselves leads to a stifling of their creativity and inability to problem-solve.

How are students supposed to survive in the "real world" if they don't learn how to think for themselves or even balance a checkbook or budget money or change a tire? We need more teachers like the one former Assistant Secretary of Education Diane Ravitch writes about in her book Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education. Ravitch writes, "Clearly she had multiple goals for her students, beyond teaching literature, and grammar. She was also teaching about character and personal responsibility. These are not the sorts of things that appear on any standardized test" about her favorite teacher, Mrs. Ruby Ratliff. Mrs. Ratliff wasn't teaching for a standardized test; she was teaching her students skills that would help them in life. She was teaching students how they should act and that they have to be responsible for themselves and their actions, things that are truly important.

Instead of cutting out two years of school as Botstein suggests, students should be required to take classes that teach students how to balance a checkbook, budget their money, the way to act in an interview, create appointments, change a flat tire, plus other life skills that students will use for the rest of their lives. In the article "High Schools are Finally Beginning to Require Personal Finance Courses," the results from a study conducted for Discover found that "High school seniors who had taken a personal finance class were more likely to save money (93% compared to 84% of students who hadn't taken a class), have a budget (60%, compared to 46%), and invest (32%, compared to 17%)." Now just imagine if educators took two years to prepare students in skills similar to the results of this study. Maybe personal finance classes are just a start, but we have go start somewhere, and this seems like the perfect place.

I understand that some people may think that precious time is being wasted in high school (as Botstein writes in his fifth paragraph): "By the time those who graduated high school go on to college and realize what really is at stake in becoming an adult, too many opportunities have been lost and too much time has been wasted.” I understand where Botstein is coming from, but if two years were spent teaching skills that students will use for the rest of their lives, then less time will be wasted.

As Ravitch writes: "We want [students] to be active, responsible citizens prepared to think issues through carefully, to listen to differing views, and to reach decisions rationally." I think that we should follow this advice, but to do this we have to cease prioritizing standardized tests that are not preparing our students for the lives ahead of them.