Photo: Lesterman (Shutterstock)
High school is supposed to be the place where we get the fundamental skills we’re going to need in life. It’s also supposed to be the place where we begin to find ourselves and figure out what we want to do with the next 50 years or so. And in some areas most high school curricula does a decent job—basic math and literacy, for example.
But a lot of people graduate high school and then spend the next decade slowly realizing how woefully unprepared their high school (or even college) experience left them for real life. There’s a reason the term “adulting” has come to be so fraught—so, so many of us leave school and march out into the world only to discover we were never taught some of the fundamental life skills we need to be successful people. This goes beyond basic how-tos—sometimes you need more than bare-bones training; you need the context and soft skills that aren’t in textbooks.
Luckily, we live in an era that allows us to take control of our education and lifelong learning. Here are 22 things you should have learned in high school—but didn’t—and some videos to help you get started figuring them out.
