What skills do you want to develop?

This is what we should be asking young people today, rather than “What subjects are you going to take?”

We’ve all been through a generation where people are stuck in high school taking subjects they don’t like because they “don’t want to limit your opportunities'' but let’s get serious… Getting 45% for accounting and hating every minute of it for three years is not a good use of your precious child's, precious time.

What we should be doing is asking our children, what skills they want to develop, or what would THEY actually like to work on. There is a good body of academic literature espousing the non-traditional values of high school subjects. History gives you the ability to take large amounts of information and condense it into something readable, usable, and memorable. Anyone here who has had to write a one-pager at work, will value that skill. Accounting is no longer only for those who want to be accountants, it is the skill of learning why format and structure are useful for solving complex and long-winded equations and challenges.

I would like to help your children identify what skills they want to develop and how best to match them to their high school subjects. 2 important things to remember: firstly, people who are working on projects (or in this case subjects) that they want to work on, work harder, are more motivated, and more likely to go the extra mile for the cause than those who don’t want to be there. Secondly, your child can always change their subjects if they want to, so nothing is set in stone.