Jessica Hagy, who writes/draws the wonderful Indexed blog, has created a great list of Nine Dangerous Things You Learned in School for the Forbes website.

All the items, including the graphs/drawings that accompany the words, are right on target but number 5 ties directly to my rant from yesterday about giving kids options in their post graduation plans.

There is a very clear, single path to success.

It’s called college. Everyone can join the top 1% if they do well enough in school and ignore the basic math problem inherent in that idea.

It’s very dangerous to believe in one right answer to any part of life, with the possible exception of stuff like “do I jump out of a plane without a parachute?”.

But the best of the bunch is number 7.

Standardized tests measure your value.

By value, I’m talking about future earning potential, not anything else that might have other kinds of value.

Of course, there are more than nine dangerous things we learned, and continue to teach kids, in school, and in writing the draft of this post, I was trying to think of a few of them.

However, this morning Doug jumped in and added many of those I was considering so instead of repeating them here, go read his thoughts.

I would only like to extend the idea in his number 6: not only don’t you need to be smart at everything, you can and should get smarter through out your life beyond school.

That’s coming from a math major who learned to write and appreciate language long after finishing “school”.