Eryk Kołcz - 04.11.2016 13:44

The school is the middle station on the way to work? How does it prepare students for future professional life?

Patrycja Jakubiec - 06.11.2016 15:04

Does high school prepare us well for professional life? You can find the answer to this question in my article:

 

Is school needed at all?  by Patrycja Jakubiec, VIII LO Kraków (Poland)

We spend most of our lives in school. But can we be sure that this is a good investment of time? We have to ask ourselves a question: is the school able to prepare us well for working life? Can we acquire skills which are necessary at work? Will we get  practical knowledge? Will we be able to find a job and be efficient enough to stay on the job market? In my opinion it may be difficult. Why?

Some claim that with such limited number of lessons of every subject we do not have a chance to deepen our understanding as much as we would like to. It is true that in Poland during two final years of school, we learn 3 subjects at extended level, but the amount of knowledge that we need to learn within this time is frighteningly big, which is why it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to memorise it all.

Another thing is that we learn only theoretical knowledge and, what’s more, in a very monotonous way. According to the latest research, Chinese students do some exercises before each lesson to oxygenate the brain and better assimilate new information. They learn faster and remember everything longer. We, unfortunately, do not have time for this. That is why during the majority of the lessons we, Polish students, sit tired and bored. Then, after returning home, we have to catch up and prepare for the next day, which takes a lot of time and is a bit discouraging. We lose the desire to learn and to satisfy our curiosity.

The school itself is not able to prepare us for life, but in Poland, because of additional classes, courses and projects we can gain the skills which we need. In the light of the above, I believe that by combining the knowledge acquired in school and the skills acquired outside, we can feel prepared for work and adventure from the start of our dream career.

  

Melina Thomzik - 27.01.2017 12:08

Hello, here are Moa from Sweden and Melina from Germany. We can't really agree with you, because we both think that school actually prepares us for working life.

We need nearly everything, maybe not really specific knowledge, but the basic. We use some of our knowledge from class in our everyday life and that’s why we also need it in working life. For example math, simple calculation is needed every time. So if you have to pay bills for example in work or have to buy something, you use math. So just think about if you never learned math, what would you do, always bring a calculator? And also that we learn different languages is very important and prepares us to talk to people which are international, and that’s pretty important in a world where every country cooperates with one another. Another example what we need  is History and Religion for culture reasons. Most jobs are international, as we already said, in our world we have to know about each other culture to get along with each other. Also we get to know a lot of different subjects so that we can figure out what kind of job we want to do in the future, so we have to get an insight view of every category, to know what we want to do in working life.

Moa and Melina