Dear North Carolina Public High School System:

It's time you made a few changes. I'm not proposing anything radical, just two simple ideas to update high school education for the 21st century.

The first suggestion I have is to update "Life Skills" classes to focus primarily on current issues, not virtues and the things we can learn from "Rudy". Today's high schoolers don't seem to understand that the way they portray themselves online can affect their futures in very dramatic ways. In an age where more and more employers are checking up on potential employees before hiring them, a negative online presence can haunt someone for life. Education of this sort, along with sections dealing with online safety and current technology, would greatly augment the existing curriculum that deals with actual 'life skills', such as saving money, and credit card use. Patience may be a virtue, but it isn't a learned skill, and in a one-semester course designed to educate young adults on various post-school matters, it has no place being taught.

The second thing I would like to propose is mandatory Spanish, and additional languages only as elective courses. I'm taking an elementary Spanish course right now, and if I had to guess, I would say that upwards of 60% of the class have never had Spanish before. Spanish, unlike most other languages, is all around us. While learning German might help down the road, if you go to Germany, learning Spanish would help the community as a whole. The more people available to translate and communicate, the better society will function. I'd like to see at least 2 years of Spanish required, and the goal be for students to graduate with the ability to understand and speak the language well enough for short conversations with Spanish speakers.

There's my 2 cents on what needs to be changed to bring schools up to date. There's much more I'd love to see change, but those two don't seem terribly difficult, and could have far-reaching impacts.