As we approach the final semester of the school year, students are starting to complain about how “pointless” the academic courses can be– claiming that schools should be teaching more practical arts like managing a home, preparing taxes, or applying for a job. 

“School should prepare you for the real world,” said Brittni Patrick, sophomore. “I don’t think that school should have requirements for all of its students and that we should have more control about what we want to learn.”

Other students elaborate more on this topic, stating the need to tailor academics to what students want for their future.

“I think that subjects like English are a very useful academic in the real world, but science should be optional because unless you’re going to be a science teacher or a scientist, it’s not that important,” said Riley Barnitz, senior.

Although these students seem to have a valid point, the idea that the entire curriculum is useless seems to be a bit of a stretch.

Assistant Principal for Curriculum & Instruction at York, Dr. Christopher Covino, thinks that some topics deemed as impractical by students are actually necessary for expanding different ways of thinking in school.

“For example, you can probably get through your entire life never having read William Shakespeare,” said Covino. “But the person who reads William Shakespeare and understands William Shakespeare has a better, broader sense for what it means to be a person in the world. The plays by William Shakespeare, for better or worse, try to focus on what it means to be truly and fully human, and that doesn’t always feel very practical.¨

However, some teachers including social studies teacher Tim Albert, believe that the practical courses actually need to have a less prominent place in school, because we can already obtain that information online.

“I think we need to move beyond straight up practical stuff,” said Albert.  “It is all there [online] and what we need to work on is how do you find information, and what do you do with the information when you find it.”

As we continue to grow as a school, York’s faculty is working on new developments on old courses and creating new ones in order to make them as useful to the students as possible in the 21st century.

“I spoke before our Board of Education,” said Covino. “I proposed fourteen-course modifications and two new courses, and those were all from the experiences of teachers and students…so every single year we modify it, we try to make them as practical and as informative for the future as possible.”

After discussing both sides to the issue and having gone through twelve years of the American school system myself, I strongly disagree with the idea that school is pointless; school is very important for preparing students for the outside world in an academic and practical manner.