Friday, October 06, 2006

11 Things You Will Not Learn At School


The following post was pulled from an email one of my associates shared with me. The comments by Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, seemed to me to be very appropriate and relevant regarding the life issues we are attempting to address in this blog. I would very much like to know your own reactions to his comments. H. Fireman

Bill Gates recently gave a speech at a high school about 11 things they did not and will not learn in school. He talked about how feel-good, politically correct teaching has created a generation of kids with no concept of reality and about how this approach to teaching fails to address very important realities in life, which sets these students up for failure in the real world.

Listed below are his Eleven Rules regarding the things these kids have not been taught:


Rule 1: Life is not fair – get used to it.

Rule 2: The world won’t care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something before you feel good about yourself.

Rule 3: You will not make $60,000 a year right out of high school. You won’t be a vice-president with a car phone until you earn both.

Rule 4: If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss.

Rule 5: Flipping hamburgers is not beneath your dignity. Your grandparents had a different word for burger flipping: they called it opportunity.

Rule 6: If you mess up, it is not your parent’s fault, so don’t whine about your mistakes… learn from them.

Rule 7: Before you were born, your parents weren’t as boring as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk about how cool you were. So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parent’s generation, try delousing the closet in your own room.

Rule 8: Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life has not. In some schools, they have abolished failing grades and they’ll give you as many times as you want to get the right answer. This doesn’t bear the slightest resemblance to anything in the real world.

Rule 9: Life is not divided into semesters. You don’t get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you find yourself. Do that on your own time.

Rule 10: Television is not real life. In real life, people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs. [Note from H.F.: And they have to pay the bill for the things they order before leaving.]

Rule 11: Be nice to nerds. Chances are you will end up working for one.


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