Daily Prompt; The New School

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You get to redesign school as we know it from the ground up. Will you do away with reading, writing, and arithmetic? What skills and knowledge will your school focus on imparting to young minds?

Photographers, artists, poets: show us SKILLED.

Unfortunately in the ending year of 2013, I would have to take away the basics that we learned as a child from being long courses of all year to cutting them in half. The reason being is there is too many other things that youngsters need to be learning.

You see, there are many brilliant and outstanding youth today, but there are also many lost souls, tossed from house to house. Some have never been taught manners, respect or how to love another human being for just simply being human.

Today when we mention love, somewhere sex has been connected to that, and what was once a beautiful way to show someone special how much you loved them; now it has turned into a nasty, pornographic, giggling at the computer screen side-show.

Some youth go strictly after the weak, fragile and lonely ones. They never learned that word respect. Just because they know how to possibly spell it, doesn’t mean they know the definition of it.

Then there is youth who are working so very hard with one or even more part-time jobs, striving to help pay their college education fees. But then there are others who don’t understand the dollar. Some never get that the real way to get money is to work. There are those who believe the cheating way to get money is to rob.

I guess drugs have been around for years. I know they were present when I was in high school. But for me, there was pretty much the fear of God placed in me by my parents  that I better never get into drugs.

Now it seems the key is to continually keep finding cheap ways to get  thrills. But this has a price included, which may have the word death in it.

So for me, there would still be reading, writing and arithmetic, but I would include at least half the year if not a little more balancing checkbooks. Budgeting classes would be almost as high of a priority as reading. Learning what percentages to save back from a paycheck in order to buy groceries, pay rents, gas, food and clothing. Training for work would not only include college prep classes. It would also include the regular jobs, how to look and represent yourself for a check-out job, or maybe a restaurant job. How to act and work in order to move up in the job.

Another class would be called, The You Inside. This class would be all about how to respect yourself. Teaching youth that they are worthy of existing here on earth. This classroom would have many mirrors in it, full length mirrors. Students would have to stand in front of them and look at themselves repeating positive and motivational sentences that refer to themselves as a person.

I feel today there is much lacking in the learning department. A lot of this is learned in the very young years, but when the home life is not the best or even suitable, many children are not taught that they have the right to be who they want.

In my area, schools are taught to preach about college. Not everyone is going to college. So many youth don’t even know what they want, but it pays the bills for these colleges getting all types in. But the drop out rates are pretty staggering.

So let’s get involved with each and every student. Let’s make sure that the poor as well as the wealthy kids are receiving a chance to be someone they are proud of, no matter what or where they came from. After all, we all started with nothing in the beginning. We all came here the same way. We all arrived with a clean slate. I say, let’s help every single human get the best chance in school to be the best they can be, no matter what.