You can go through elementary school and high school and even college and graduate school—all without learning how to manage your money or change a tire. Sure, you might have learned how to divide fractions in math class or that the largest cell in the human body is the female egg in biology, but how far are these random facts going to get you in the real world?
One notion that a lot of young adults leave their schooling with is “Um, how do I adult?” “Adulting” is one of the most important skills you need, and yet no school actually covers the basics of life skills, whether it means how to do your taxes or how to work the laundry machine (you’d be surprised at how many people don’t know how to do that!).
One high school is finally drawing the line. Fern Creek High School in Louisville, Kentucky now offers a course that will teach students how to do all the daily life things. Appropriately titled “Adulting 101,” the three-day courses allows students to leave with a ton of handy information—from learning how to cook to how to hang up a picture on the wall.
“We’re preparing students for life after high school,” College Access Resource teacher Sara Wilson-Abell, who created the course. “Yesterday was all about money, today it’s home and health and tomorrow it’s about being a professional,” she said explaining the curriculum.
One student who took the course, Lily, says she gained a lot of valuable information from Adulting 101—things she probably wouldn’t have learned before having to mange them herself. “I know I have a spare tire in my car, but I would have known nothing to do with it,” she said. “I learned a lot about how to do my laundry. I mean, I kind of knew some aspects of it, but I never sorted by clothes or anything like that.”
It’s easy to scoff and wonder why “kids these days don’t know how to do anything.” But the answer is simple: If you were never taught something, how are you supposed to know how to do it?
“They’re like, ‘Oh they should know how to change a tire, they should just know how to do this stuff.’ But we actually in reality have never been taught this, so we don’t know how to do any of it,” Lily said.
Some argue that parents should be the ones to teach their kids how to do “adult” things, but not all students have parents who are able to teach them things like this.
Wilson-Abell plans to bring ”Adulting 101” back to Fern Creek next year and is hoping that more schools follow suit.
To learn more about Adulting 101 and students have the option to learn about in the class, check out the video below!
What do you think about offering a class purely on how to be an adult? Do you think schools should be teaching this skill or is it the parents’ responsibility? What are some “adulting” skills you wish you knew when you graduated?