First things first. What are “life skills”?

It’s rather simple actually. They are the skills that help you simply live. The things that you would need to provide yourself essential sustenance – whether within or outside established systems.

It starts from very basic needs which are essential to sustenance (survival). Things like:

• Growing, harvesting and preparing food
• Building survival shelters
• Protecting yourself from physical and/or psychological harm
• Basic water purification
• Interaction with different types of people

And many more …

Unfortunately, none of these rather important skills are imparted in school environments today.

What is sold as “Education” today is merely literacy.

Literacy is NOT education

Far from it. Granted it does have some value, but not a lot. And, that is even when you consider any board, any school, any state, even any country.

The focus has always been literacy.

When people or organizations or governments talk about education systems, they’re unfortunately only talking about literacy systems.

Even higher education suffers from this. They’re mere literacy systems where an artificial hierarchy has been enforced and unfortunately accepted, despite plenty of available wisdom and proof against it.

Almost every school or college confers (or works to confer) some sort of a certificate which enables you to get into the next level of this literacy hierarchy.

The madness doesn’t stop.

People who go through this are already brainwashed. The more you’ve been educated in these systems, the more you’ve been brainwashed. Then they subject their children to the same useless systems. Parents who go through this and become “educated” tend to become incapable of thinking outside of these systems (which is one of the goals of the system).

But, here a fact that should shake you at least a little.

Absolutely none of what you learn in school is required for you to live a healthy and happy life.

In fact, schooling is not required for getting into college (if you choose to do so) and it’s documented in books such as “College without High School” by Blake Boles. And, a college degree isn’t required for you to work for some of the best companies in the world such as Amazon, Google, Apple and more.

No school student learns about essential sustenance mechanisms.

They don’t learn to interact with people across ages and are limited to their peer groups and school staff. Very few, if any life skills are taught in school, and absolutely none of it shows up in prescribed curricula. If some of it does show up, it tends to be rather superficial. It also tends to be unimportant to the parents or the schools.

The subjects which are given importance instead, are actually only useful if you want to become a teacher or researcher in a rather limited area. Otherwise, they’re not useful for living … or even for a career.

There is tons of documentation – over centuries now of several successful people, who had none to very little formalized schooling. In more recent years, there are many more young people who are doing very well for themselves with none to very little formal education or qualifications.

On a personal note, I grew up in military bases and because of that went to the most mainstream of schools you can imagine. Very little, if anything from the classrooms came in handy in life.

After what is called “basic schooling”, one can start getting exposed to life in the real world – at least to some extent as it can involve long periods away from home.

The most important things that help tend to be what you learn at home, what your parents impart to you, and what you learn by interacting with people who are not your peers.

When you’re away from home, you have to find a place to stay, you have to learn to clothe yourself appropriately, you have to learn how to feed yourself, you have to learn how to interact with people you would come across personally and professionally.

Fixed curricula based, age-segregated, time and teacher controlled, classroom based schooling will always be incapable of delivering these much needed and very important life skills.