The scene repeats itself in every workshop, every talk, and every classroom: boys and girls who have spent their entire lives in school—from kindergarten to high school—yet they head out into the world without knowing what the world actually needs.

It’s not their fault. It’s the fault of a system that has become fossilized.

Because if you are young today, there is an uncomfortable but real truth:

You spent 12 years studying… but no one taught you how to live in 2025.

🔥 They don’t know how to write… because they were never truly taught

Schools obsess over accents, connectors, and “write two pages on this topic.” But they don’t teach:

• how to argue
• how to tell an idea
• how to write a professional email
• how to write something that another person actually wants to read

The result: kids who pass exams but cannot write a clear idea without help. Schools teach spelling, but they never taught communication.

🔥 They talk a lot, with very few words

The vocabulary of many students revolves around 300–500 real words. They don’t read, they aren’t encouraged to read, and social media doesn’t offer varied language. The consequence? Entire conversations sustained through the force of “literal,” “vibe,” “like,” “totally,” “dude,” and mental emojis.

It’s not intellectual anemia: it’s a lack of exposure to real language.

🔥 Fear of public speaking: a classic imported from the old school

How can we expect a kid to speak in front of 10 people… if they never spoke in front of the class beyond reading a paragraph with a trembling voice?

In other countries, public speaking is practiced from age 6. Here, at 18, you still don’t know how to look at an audience without feeling like you’re going to die.

🔥 Intermediate English, sign language, basic alphabets… no one taught you that

School English is reduced to:

• past tense verbs
• workbook exercises
• filling in empty phrases

But you don’t converse, you don’t improvise, you don’t watch real content. And like that, it’s impossible to learn.

As for sign language or basic alphabets (Greek, Cyrillic, etc.)… they simply do not exist within the curriculum, even though the world has been globalized for years.

🔥 Digital era, analog education

It’s unbelievable but real: in the middle of the era of software, AI, and microservices…

most schools continue to teach informatics as if it were 1999.

Kids graduate without knowing:

• what object-oriented programming is
• what a design pattern is
• the difference between relational and non-relational databases
• how hosting works
• what WordPress is
• how a web page is structured

But they do know how to change the font in PowerPoint. It’s tragicomical.

🔥 No one taught you how to save lives

CPR 30×2. AED use. Heimlich maneuver. Basic first aid. What to do if someone faints or if there is an armed attack. How to use a fire extinguisher without burning yourself.

None of this is taught. Nothing. And it could save lives.

The school prefers you to memorize dates from 1810 rather than teaching you how to prevent someone from dying right in front of you.

💥 The Uncomfortable Truth: schools form “graders,” not capable people

Students don’t graduate ignorant. They graduate ill-prepared, because the 12 years they spent inside the system were not designed for real life.

Today’s school:

• does not engage with the professional world
• is not connected with technology
• does not develop social skills
• does not train critical thinking
• does not teach how to survive or communicate

It only trains to pass exams, not to understand the world.

💡 What should a 21st-century graduate actually know?

The basics. The logical stuff. The urgent stuff:

Communication

✔ Knowing how to write with clarity ✔ Speaking in public without panic ✔ Understanding how to build an argument

Languages

✔ Real conversational English ✔ Basic sign language ✔ Identifying alphabets of the world

Technology

✔ Computational thinking ✔ Programming logic ✔ Databases ✔ Management of CMS like WordPress ✔ Real digital culture, not just “Word–Excel–PowerPoint”

Life and Health

✔ CPR ✔ First aid ✔ Use of fire extinguishers ✔ What to do in emergencies ✔ Basic self-protection

We aren’t talking about being geniuses. We are talking about being functional in 2025.

🔚 Conclusion (and the final blow)

The kids aren’t failing. The system failed first.

Today’s youth aren’t graduating illiterate: they are graduating as survivors of an educational model that denied them real tools, filled them with useless theory, and left them alone facing a world that demands from them what no one ever taught them.

And the question that remains floating is: How much longer are we going to wait to update the school to the life we actually live?