<p>What are the most important courses that YOU think every high school student should have taken by the time they graduate?</p>
<p>biology. US history. rhetoric/language. finance. multimedia (photoshop, flash, windows movie maker, etc.).</p>
<p>I think math and science are becoming more important. Also english is always important. I would suggest some history and an art or music class</p>
<p>-English (4 years), including topics on language and literature. The literature component should compose important books in the Western canon as well as novels outside of it, written by authors who are not from the U.S. or Europe. (I’d say 20-30% should be of authors outside the Western canon.) Writing and analyzing/understanding passages should be the major focus of the first two years, and applying those skills to the novels in the last 2.
-Mathematics (algebra preferably up to calculus, but stopping with pre-calc is fine)
-History – both a survey of world history and a survey of U.S. history
-Civic/citizenship/government, 2 years. 1 year would be on U.S. citizenship and government, focusing on civic duties, responsibilities, and rights as a U.S. citizen (the constitution, how voting works, the two houses of legislature, the three branches, you know). The second year would be a study of “cosmopolitanism” or world citizenship, with a study of the different types of government in different countries (focusing primarily on that of the U.S.'s current top business and diplomatic partners). A required component would be on world religions and their impact on government.
-A course on economics
-A foreign language for 3 years (most high schools require 2. If I had my way we’d be taking Spanish from kindergarten on up, and adding another language of our choice in middle school – and our choices would be better than just French and German – but barring that, I think we should take a language for at least 3 years).
-3 years of science - Biology, chemistry, and physics</p>
<p>I don’t think that it is essential or even all-important for a student to take a class in computer skills at the high school level (the computer class I was required to take in high school was terribly outdated and focused on teaching us skills that most of us already knew how to do and had been doing since elementary school). I think that students should be given the option to take one or more classes in the fine arts, but those are not the most important.</p>