With the impending GCSE exams just around the corner year eleven students across the country are revising everything from the Russian Revolution to trigonometric identities. At this stage of the year, the exams seem to be the main focus of our lives with the added pressure of attempting to achieve the best grades to aid our future prospects and university and job applications. However, one question that still prevails is whether or not any of the content we desperately memorise and use in exams is actually practical or applicable in everyday life.
Most of us admit that the general knowledge we gain from some of the GCSE content is advantageous for the future and can be helpful for when we enter the wider world and begin our independent lives. Nevertheless, a large proportion of the things we are taught over the two years of our GCSE courses are futile. For example, students today are taught how to use the sine and cosine rules for finding the lengths and angles of triangles and told to memorise formulae for a few exams that seem to have a great impact on the rest of their lives and the opportunities that will be available to them.
Surely, alongside the useful material of the current GCSEs, students should be introduced to teaching of purposeful and relevant information that actually assists their upcoming generation in their transition from school pupils to independent citizens. Students are given hypothetical situations in exams for which they are required to use mathematical techniques to solve but are not taught anything about money or budgeting skills. In the advancing world, the basic financial concepts as well as communicational, safety and employability skills are pre-eminent. Outside, in the wider world, these traits surpass all of the supposedly important content of the GCSE courses.
Despite being aware of all of this for so many years, the education system has not seemed to have accepted this truth and has continued to subject students to the nugatory exams and courses that actually have no content that directly links to surviving in the real world, causing the majority to be startled by the reality of the world as they come to the end of their school journeys and being completely unprepared for life.
