I wish I had had a class in communication and relationships. It could have been just part of another class, just 3 or 4 weeks of it would have been enough.
Somewhere kids should learn about compounding interest (I learned this very very young, my first grade teacher opened bank accounts for us, and although I didn’t fully understand the math then, I still knew I get money from my money). Learn about credit and what affects your credit. What you will need to rent an apartment or buy a house.
In Jr. High we had Home Ec, and I think everyone should take Home Ec, I can’t believe some schools don’t have it anymore. We all took it for a quarter, and then could take additional semester classes in sewing and cooking if we wanted to. The quarter long class touched on basic kitchen skills, cooking terms, actual cooking, safety issues in the kitchen, a little sewing, a little cleaning, using large and small appliance, etc.
In High School I took accounting. It was an elective, most students didn’t take it. Great class. We learned in a year what you would learn in a semester of College level. I left feeling I could be a bookkeeper at a company as long as the books were already set up. Also, we learned to do our own individual taxes, and little things like the proper way to write a check (from what I have seen a lot of people write them out incorrectly, but it doesn’t matter much). We also of course learned how to balance a checking account. We already had learn balance sheets, P&L statements, so it was more of the same mathematically. We learned how to find mistakes, like divisible by 9 means it is a transposition error, stuff like that. We also learned to use an adding machine, I guess everything is done on computers now.