The public education system does a lot of things right.
Growing up, I attended the public school system in a Midwest college town. A vibrant, culturally diverse community, it exposed me to as many new and different ideas as the brick-and-mortar high school I went to. With teachers hailing from West Africa to Austria, their own experiences helped fuel their lessons. These teachers helped me re-discover a love of reading while reminding me of my immense dislike for algebra. By the time they were ready to kick me out of the graduating door, I felt ready to take on the world.
And this was one of the school’s first failures.
While focusing on book smarts, there were a number of life lessons I wish they could have educated me on ahead of time. I’m not even talking about the veiled lie of the only way to succeed in life was to attend the best college possible (while not educating anyone about student loans, forcing 18-year-old kids into massive amounts of debt. Kind of sounds like a class action lawsuit waiting to happen, but I digress).
I’m not talking about the lack of life skill classes offered. At my high school, only individuals deemed to have learning disabilities were taught how to properly operate a dishwasher, and how to bake cookies or bread (I need to break out some kind of Egyptian hieroglyphics manual to understand the damn icons on washing machines now).
I’m not even talking about never teaching us how to sew a button back onto a shirt, how to fix a dripping sink, or how to change a vehicle’s oil. In these ways, YouTube has educated me more in life skills than the school system.
No, I’m talking about life lessons. Experience every single one of us is bound to go through, yet are not fully prepared to do so.
Because if you’re like me, you left high school ready to take on the world, not realizing that the world was more than ready to take on you.
How to Handle a Breakup
There’s a Seinfeld episode where Elaine discovers she’s dating someone she refers to as a “bad breaker-upper.” While talking with Jerry she spouts off, “I can’t be with someone who doesn’t break up nicely. I mean, to me, that’s one of the most important parts of a relationship.”
As a 14-year-old kid, I watched the episode as it aired, thinking it funny a person would end a relationship based on how someone else might end it.
As an adult, I still laugh at the quote. But not for the same reason.
I laugh because I fully understand what Elaine means.
The death of a relationship can leave us tarnished. Beaten. Broken. In high school, we felt torn apart when a three-week fling crashed and burned, but we had no idea what lay in store for us.
And the first time the world comes swinging with the sudden conclusion of a meaningful relationship, we don’t know how to handle it.
I’m fast approaching 40 and I still don’t know if I know how to handle it.
It’s a learning experience, and yet every experience differs from the previous. Every cut fresh. Every new memory forged. I went through a divorce. I handled it the way I handled it. Which means I had no clue what to do as I found myself trying to navigate a rudderless, wind-torn sail of a ship through choppy waters. I made it through, but not without more damage along the way.
Failure
In school you’re taught if you are dedicated and put in the work, you can accomplish anything.
Oh, how I wish that was the case.
If only achieving our dreams rested solely in our hands. Things would have worked out differently for so many of us.
School doesn’t teach us there are self-appointed gatekeepers guarding our goals. Gatekeepers we have little to no influence over.
Maybe we’re not tall enough, fast enough, the right age, the right skin color, the right gender. Maybe we don’t know the right people, or have the right money. Have the right hairline. Heck, maybe we’re not in the right place at the right time.
Whatever the gatekeeper is, no amount of skill or determination can make up for that extra ingredient known as luck.
They don’t teach us about that in school, and by doing so they don’t educate us on failure. We don’t learn what it’s like to continually fail at something. That certain dreams may simply not be possible.
The closest thing any of us probably came to learning about failure was being cut from a sports team. I loved playing baseball. Of all the sports I played growing up it by far was my favorite. I was devastated when the high school baseball team cut me on the final day of tryouts.
What hurt more was another kid, who didn’t go to tryouts because he went to Florida for spring break made the team. Was he good? No, he rode the bench. But his dad was buddies with the assistant coach.
Reality served me up with two life lessons at the ripe old age of 16, but I didn’t want to buy into it. That wasn’t how the world works, right?
It’s exactly how the world works. And sometimes nothing can be done about failure. At times the failure might open us up to other opportunities, and other times it stings and makes us bitter toward actual reality.
Maybe we wouldn’t be so bitter if we had learned about failure earlier on in school.
Life Isn’t A Competition
With social media, it is so easy to fall into a comparative rut. From buying homes and pumping out kids to traveling the world and excelling at work, everyone else on social media seems to be doing better than you.
I know I feel that nagging prick of comparative lifestyles when pulling up social media. And while we shouldn’t compare what we’re doing with that of someone else, it’s built right into the fibers of our school systems.
The best students receive more recognition at graduation. The best of the best gets to make a speech (and then will give the most generic speech of how they are looking at a crowd of doctors and lawyers and a bunch of successful people). Students compete for parts in plays and seats in the orchestra. After a test we instantly compare it to our friends. So much about school revolves around competing against one another.
Schools managed to pit us against each other in competition and still not teach us about failure. Because while you didn’t land first chair violin, you still scored third chard, and that’s still pretty good. You might not be Maria in West Side Story, but you still receive a fantastic solo number.
It’s competition without the risk of failure. No wonder we all enter the world believing we’re invincible. Because if we fail there will still be second place.
The reality of it all is life, in the grand scheme of things, isn’t a competition. I can’t stack (or I shouldn’t) stack my accomplishments up against my friends, those I follow on social media, or readers of what I have to write.
We’re all unique and have individualized paths that are impossible to compare. Life isn’t a competition, yet it’s still one of the hardest lessons to learn.
Even harder than algebra.
Books!
Want to “Rent” one of my books without paying for it? Here’s a free 30-day trial to Kindle Unlimited! You can then read the books without ever buying them!
Pre-Order my new suspense romance thriller, “A Photo to Die For.”
If you want a quick, fun summertime read, check out my latest romance novel, “The Forbidden Book Club.”
Maybe you’d like to read more about other travels I’ve done? Grab, “Travel For the Soul (Even if You Don’t Have One).”