We don’t know about you, but our secondary school lives were filled with useless information that has absolutely zero opportunity for application in modern life. Yes, we did GCSE German – and can therefore tell people that we enjoyed playing golf with our father (we don’t), had a pet guinea pig (we didn’t) and danced in the disco with Suzy last Tuesday (you get the pattern here…).
But can we order a drink? Or book a hotel room? Or ask where the bathroom is? Yeah... not so much. And has anyone used trigonometry? Ever? School might be good at preparing us for getting A Levels and maybe even a place at university, but in terms of preparing us for actually functioning as fully-formed, non-imbecilic adults, it’s was probably a little bit lacking.
It’s something that hasn’t gone unnoticed by (now outgoing) education secretary Michael Gove, who’s said that teenagers should learn about the ‘real world’ in school, including math lessons in mortality and health statistics, computer programming in computer science (how is this not already a thing?!) and the culture and ‘sociological issues’ of a country when learning languages at A Level.
Apparently, all of this will make the next generation of young people more appealing candidates for university places and future jobs. Which is all totally tickety-boom terrific for them, but what about us poor sods? Here’s what we wished we had learned how to do at school.
How to write an actual CV and cover letter
We remember our careers advice lessons consisting of an eye-bleedingly boring multiple- choice questionnaire that was about 4,000 pages long and only ended up telling half the class to be lawyers. Or zoologists. Not exactly all that inspiring or useful.
What would have been much better is a lesson in how to cater your CV and cover letter to fit specific job sectors and which actually hammered home the importance of gaining experience other than ‘one day shadowing my dad at work/drinking hot chocolate from the coffee machine’ and ‘helped my gran sell cakes at the local fair’.
And what about interview skills? No one even MENTIONED them. Here’s a bonkers idea – actually getting us prepared for the world of work might just have prepared us a bit more for that whole post-university jobs crisis we’re all wading through at the moment. Just a thought…
How to actually have an enjoyable sex life
Beyond explaining that, yes, you can get pregnant if you have sex standing on your head/on a biscuit tin and showing us how to put a condom on a banana, our school-time sex education told us sweet fuck all about how to actually go about having sex in a way that a) was not the most humiliating experiences of our lives; b) actually ended up with the woman having an orgasm; or c) didn’t leave the girl feeling totally shitty afterwards.
So the unfortunate truth is that most people our age got their sexual education from porn, meaning that we’ve all spent a number of years grappling with pubic hair, the pros and cons of anal sex – and the delightful misconception that all women need to reach an orgasm is a cursory squeeze of a breast and three, solid pumps in the vagina.
For this, we will never forgive our educators.
How to bleed a radiator
There are a million things that need to get done around the home that – since we were never taught this basic information at a young age – we now have to shell out money we don’t have to get a contractor round to complete.
We hear that an idiot can bleed a radiator, but that didn’t stop us having to pay all of our weekly wine money on some geezer – who sat on our living room floor, drinking our tea with their arse out – to do it for us.
Again, thanks very much Design & Technology department, that excellent nutcracker we made MORE than makes up for our woeful lack of home improvement skills.
How to do a tax return
More and more of us are now becoming our own bosses and going freelance, but do any of us actually know how to go about doing our tax returns? Do we heck! Which means a number of us merrily go on about our way, blissfully unaware that we’re underpaying tax, only to be hit with a totally debilitating bill further down the line.
As the old idiom goes, death and taxes are the only two certainties in life – so why isn’t a basic guide to HMRC nestled somewhere on the National Curriculum?
**How to drink without ruining our lives or being a total dick **
When it came to drinking, we were taught from an early age that alcohol was something you drink to get drunk – and certainly never in public until you turn 18. Oh yeah, and eating’s cheating. So most of our formative years were spent sat in a park necking cheap vodka waiting for someone to be sick all over the place, insult everyone or get their stomach pumped.
All you have to do is look at your local Yates’ bar to see how difficult it is for this early drinking behaviour to be un-learned. We’d hazard a guess that that guy who wasn’t taught how to drink without being a total dickhead when he was a teenager will be the one who burps in your ear while groping your arse in the queue for a nightclub and asking you for the number of a ketamine dealer.
If that’s not reason enough to get honest with children about drink and drugs as early as possible, we really don’t know what is.
Follow Sophie on Twitter @sophiecullinane
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.