High school isn’t so much about preparing teenagers for adult life. In Sweden, you have a subject about cooking and personal finance, but only until secondary school. I think this makes sense: you only need one course on practical adult skills. After you know the basics, it’s all about practising IRL.

But being a competent grown-up involves many other skills. It’s not just about successfully running a household – it’s also a matter of “running yourself”. There are plenty of “serious” subjects we could fit in a standard high school curriculum. Here’s a vibe-based list:

• Learning: Please please please, teach high schoolers about spaced repetition, interleaving and testing. The ability to learn things quickly is useful in any domain of life. In the future, this skill will probably become even more useful, as AI speeds up social and technological progress.
• Rationality: If you want a serious-sounding name for this subject, call it behavioural economics or applied philosophy. Basic knowledge about cognitive biases and System 1 and System 2 isn’t just intellectual amusement – it’s also very practical. If everyone learned about confirmation bias at an early age, would there be as much polarisation in the world?
• Curiosity: We could also make high-schoolers read non-fiction or watch videos on popular science. Make them read or watch videos about the French revolution, the opioid crisis in the US, personal effectiveness, the holocaust, the nature of time, the Bauhaus school of design, John Houdini… They could also organise seminars for each other, as in Fractal. Forcing students to memorise facts won’t produce life-long learners.
• Statistics: Most people are forced to take a stats class at university, and for good reason. Statistics is one of the most useful academic disciplines, and it forms the backbone of all science. Maybe we could teach high schoolers about Bayesian inference, hypothesis testing and confidence intervals. This material can be made accessible to high schoolers: you can explain Bayes’ rule by means of rectangles and teach students simple algorithms for hypothesis testing and computing confidence intervals.
• General AI: I almost feel obligated to add something directly AI-related. I think students should be taught the basics of machine learning: how gradient descent works, general transformer architecture, etc. This is much as students are taught about evolution and the different parts of the cell. I think this would empower people to reason more clearly about transformative AI¹.
• Wellbeing: You might also offer a course on wellbeing, incorporating elements of philosophy and the science of happiness.
• Agency: We could also teach a class on on agency, by which I mean the art of “doing stuff”. Most high-schoolers have never experienced the joy of agency, the joy of poking at the world and noticing something happening. One could e.g. have a project-based class where high-schoolers get to found their own companies or orgs².

I’m the most bullish about the benefits of taking classes on learning and rationality. I’m not as certain about the benefits of the remaining subjects. So, here’s one suggestion for a high-school curriculum: take a standard high school curriculum, make learning and rationality mandatory and offer the remaining subjects as electives. Overall, this seems like this kind of curriculum would produce more well-rounded, curious doers – the kind of people who might solve the world’s most pressing problems.