Hey, public schools, teach the kids things they can use.

Sam, 22, has his first job interview. It's for a sales position at a window manufacturer. Sam is wearing a new suit, carrying a freshly printed resume and sporting a new hair cut.

He sails through his interview with no problem at all. The interviewer loves him. They have great raport and Sam has all but been offered the job.

"So, Sam, one last question for you," the interviewer says. "In the U.S. Presidential election of 1904, who was the Republican candidate?"

...

Lisa, 23, has just finished art school and has a sweet, new gig at some fancy design firm. She has a desk, a drawer full of colored pencils and a phone. HR calls her on that phone to schedule her benefits introudction.

So Lisa heads to the HR department and is handed a folder chalk-full of paper. That night, Lisa stares blankly at a W something form. She can tell anybody the RGB and CMYK values of colors and what inks work on what kinds of papers and how to most-efficiently lay out a brochure. But for the life of her, she doesn't know what "head of household" means.

Lisa feels she might have to quit her job.

...

Jeff, 18, has just gotten his first apartment. His portion of the rent is $515.00. In order to pay the rent, Jeff must write a check.

So Jeff sits and stares at his new checkbook. What is a memo, anyway?

...

The point is that Christopher Colombus and commas and chemistry are all very cool, but unless you're planning on being a history teacher, an editor or a cancer researcher (and let's face it, not many of us are any of those), then most of us are wasting our time in public schools.

Too many of us look at tax forms and go dizzy. Some of us can recite Shakespearian sonnets but can't balance a checkbook (thank you, online banking). And a good chunk of us can't grocery shop worth a damn.

Instead of learning life-relevant things in school, we colored maps of Africa and memorized songs in Castillian Spanish. Side note: Why did we learn Castillian Spanish? Last I checked, Spain was an ocean away while Mexico is a car ride away. Teaching Texas children Castillian Spanish is like teaching kids in Mexico the English language with a British-English accent.

Oh, but schools overfill brains with all of the history, political history, chemistry, physics, biology, algebra, geometry, European literature, African literature ... Some of this stuff is very relevant. The problem is that different things will be relevant to differnet people.

I write for a living. My job is to make things understandable and perhaps make boring things slightly more entertaining. I don't need the quadratic formula. I'll never need the quadratic formula unless some crazy dude holds a gun to my head and demands, "Tell me the quadratic formula or this bullet's going between your eyes."

And if that does ever happen, this is a world I don't want to be a part of any longer.

So is there a way to change the education system? Probably not. And if there is, none of us have the mental tools to figure it out. After all, schools were too busy teaching us to standardized tests.