11 Things We Want Indian Schools To Teach The Kids

Adulting is a pain. After you grow up and enter the real world, you realise life isn’t a piece of cake. It has more problems to offer you than just worrying about marks, and there are problems we never knew were coming our way. Anyway, I am an adult now and to be honest, I often wonder how awesome would it have been if my school taught how to lead an adult life, if it taught me how to survive this bad, bad world and if it taught me life skills other than trigonometry, which well, I don’t even use. So here are 11 things that I really wish Indian schools would starting teaching students.   

1. Taxes

Income tax, income tax return, declarations, Form 16 and God knows what all – taxes are one thing that every Indian has to pay and our lives would have been so easy if we were taught how to file our taxes on our own. We wouldn’t be spending hours of our time with CAs and finance people to understand what exactly to do and how to pay the government.

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2. Good Touch, Bad Touch 

Kids are gullible and easy to manipulate. If we don’t teach them about good touch and bad touch, they won’t know if someone is taking advantage of them or not. Girls, as young as 6 years old are getting raped in our country, and so, it’s really important that we educate our younger generations about good touch and bad touch.

3. Consent

With the unending, bogus information going around on the internet these days, it’s very easy for kids to get incorrect information about something as basic as consent, when schools could just teach the kids about it and make it easy for everyone. We need to get to the grassroot level and talk about the problem of consent.

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4. Gender Sensitisation

I didn’t even know that the LGBTQ community existed until I was 17 years old. Imagine, for 17 years I had no clue that there are people my age who have different sexual preferences. Forget that, full-grown adults still don’t understand gender sensitisation and it’s high time we introduce sessions on it at schools.

5. Banking And Investments

If you aren’t from commerce background, you were probably never taught about banking and investments. But when you grow up, you are suddenly expected to know these things. Like, HOW? If schools start teaching these subjects to everyone, irrespective of their field, it’ll really come in handy when we are standing at the bank counter, looking all confused, understanding absolutely nothing how things work.

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6. Public Place Etiquette

People in India don’t know or follow any public place etiquette. They’ll run and cross the road even when the traffic light is green. They’ll stand on the elevator on both sides and won’t move. They will put their feet on the back of your seat, or your arm rest during flights – and be offended if you ask them to shift. If our school taught basic public place etiquette, our lives would be so much more peaceful.

7. Sex Education

Now you’ll say that schools do have sex education sessions, well, ask anyone and they’ll tell you how useless those sessions were. Sex education is not just explaining intercourse, but also to remove the stigmas around it and the importance of safe practices. Children should be taught about the changes their bodies will go through, how to deal with it and most importantly, to not be ashamed.

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8. Relationships

Relationships are tough to deal with when you grow up. No one teaches you about heartbreaks, failed friendships, broken families. If there were lessons on interpersonal relationships, how easy our lives would be. Dealing with relationships problems wouldn’t have been this miserable.

9. Mental Health

Another important thing that schools need to teach us is everything about mental health. From depression to bipolarism to anxiety – we need to make our kids aware about these issues and sensitise them about people suffering from mental health issues. 

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10. Cyber World

We live in the 21st century where the internet is everything. It’s extremely crucial that we teach our kids about the cyber world. We need to tell them how to be safe online and protect themselves from getting involved in anything dangerous.

11. Tolerance

Everyone has different tolerance levels when they grow up, but imagine, if you were taught how to be tolerant since you were a kid, it wouldn’t have been a struggle to fight yourself to tackle things in life. In a world where everyone has an opinion about everything, we need to teach our kids to be more tolerant.

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