Utah Considers Doing Away with 12th Grade - Your thoughts??

The first half of the 12th grade was very beneficial for me; the second half...no so much. The first half is really when you are applying to college; high school teachers and advisers should be helping with this process, which is the biggest and most important benefit of the 12th grade. After halfway through, you've gotten most of the applications ready and are just waiting.

When I was in high school and in 12th grade I thought it was a waste of time. I really didn't learn much that year that was going to benefit me in the long run. I already had most of the credits that I needed to have to graduate school. I really like the idea on internship. High school really doesn't teach you for what's coming next. Work! High school just shoves all this information on different subjects into your head and then shoves you out the door to the "real" world and hopes you can find your way. Now if you take that last year of high school and use it to help students for when they leave, by doing internship, job training and maybe even information on professions that they might be interested in, it would help greatly. I think if I had this as my last year I wouldn't have gone through 8 jobs in the past 5 years. Plus, I might be in college right now as I type instead of working my a** off barely making enough money to live on. I think if you really want to help students succeed in life, "like the teachers always told me", then the school systems should do something like this to help out their students. I wish I had this while I was in school!

I don't think they should do away with the 12th grade, however, I do feel that they curriculum taught during the 12th grade. This last year of school should be used to help prepare students for life in the real world. As funny as it may sound, a home economics class should be required. This would provide some much needed culinary skills that a lot of kids these days lack. Skills like cooking, laundry, and shopping could be learned, and they could also learn basic sewing skills, all of which will (or at least COULD) come in handy later in life. Another type of skills that should be taught during the 12th grade is something that our schools fail miserably at doing. Financial classes should be required for any student before they graduate. Our educational system falls WAY short of teaching graduating students even the most basic financial skills they will need in life. Unfortunately, the average student is not being taught many (if ANY) of these skills at home either. Most students going out into the world after high school are barely able to effectively balance a check book, and the know virtually nothing about saving or investing. Students should be required to pass accounting/financial literacy classes before graduating. These classes should educate students on topics such as stocks, bonds, money-market accounts, CD's, and other investment opportunities. They should also teach money management, budgeting, and other financial related topics. I can say first-hand that my life would have probably turned out a little better financially if I had had some of these classes in high school. For someone who grew up in a small, country town in Georgia, the idea that I could have started investing at a young age was about as feasible to me as the idea that I could have gone to the moon. I had heard of the Wall Street Journal on TV commercials, but there wasn't anywhere I knew of within 50 miles of my home town where I could have actually gotten a copy. I knew nothing about how the stock market, bonds, or money market accounts worked. I knew nothing of CD's. I also had no idea that I could have started investing in one form or another as soon as I started working. When I heard someone talking about investing on TV, I thought that investing was something only people in the big cities were able to become involved in. I certainly didn't think that investing in stocks, bonds, or other investment avenues was feasible for a small town kid just out of high school. Sadly, all I really would have needed to know were a few of the right questions to ask, and who to ask. Another good idea would be to have a class that would teach basic skills like how to check the oil (and other fluids) in your car, how to check your tire pressure, how to read a tape measure, how to turn off power at the breaker box, and other skills that would come in handy around the house. Some people would say that it isn't the school's responsibility to teach these sorts of skills. While they may be right to an extent, I also feel that the objective/purpose of our high schools is to prepare students for life after graduation. We must not forget that some students these days don't really have anyone to show them how to do these things, especially with the growing number of single-parent families in our society. In past generations, it has been thought to be the father's job to teach things of this nature to kids as the kids mature. However, more and more kids these days are growing up in a home where this is no father/father figure, so they essentially have no one to teach them some of the basic home or car maintenance skills they may need to know. Having a class to teach them some basic facts, and perhaps give them some hands-on experience with a few things, could certainly be an asset to them later in life. So, the 12th grade year should not be done away with. The classes required during the senior year should be designed to teach some skills and concepts that will better prepare students for real life, especially since most of the classes taken in the last few years of high school are generally geared towards preparing kids to either go to work, or go off to college. While these things are certainly important, and should not be taken lightly by any means, our students would certainly be well served by some classes that would teach them some common sense skills and give them some financial guidance...

Here in the UK we have education until 16 and then it is non compulsory. They are thinking they might raise the leaving age to 18 which I suppose would make it equal to 12th grade. I left at 16 years old. I wish I had stayed because I really wanted to do something more with my education. My mother wished me to get a job and contribute to the family coffers and so that is what had to happen. I believe that staying on until you are 17/18 is a good thing ,you are more mature then and better able to apply yourself to study but I don't think that us right for everyone. My children came out of school at 7 and 8 years old(to be home-schooled) and returned at 16 to do their last two years in the school, that was so that they could gain the qualifications needed to enter university. At the beginning of the year in which each went back,they had some problems with the disinterested 16 year olds who had returned to school only because they had not found a job. By about 3 months into that term (Christmas) most of those people had decided to leave anyway and it left the more studious students in peace.