Teaching life skills at school "Not for life, but for school do we learn." This Latin proverb saddened me deeply when I first heard it. It shows that already in the era of the Roman empire the school was seen as a separate institution, moved away from the rest of the society, where it's doctrines couldn't be put in practice. Thus, in order to get excellent marks, a student would have to study given theories, texts and songs by heart, without worrying about the practical applications of this information. If you ask me, the general idea of school hasn't changed much in the past 2000 years. Looking back to my school times, I recall hours after hours of studying all kinds of theories from cellular biology to the moral philosophy of Immanuel Kant, which doubtlessly were interesting topics but unfortunately had nothing to do with our everyday lives. To be fair, we also gained some useful skills. For example, there was a compulsory cooking and householding class. For two hours a week we were not only taught how to prepare a healthy meal or do the laundry, but we also got to try these things out. For many of us students, the weekly hours of cooking were the favourite classes, because it was those skills that we loved to show our parents at home, by baking a cake or doing the dishes by ourselves. In addition to those exciting cooking classes we also had another subject, the goal of which was to make us fully functional citizens: the society and politics class. I must admit that teaching the parliamentary system to a classroom full of 14-year-olds can be a tough task, but I still reckon that the teacher should have found a way of teaching other than lecturing us passages from the study book and making us copy notes from the board. In the future, I truly hope to see a school where the students can learn not for school, but for life.