Learning how to effectively learn is the most important skill tbh.
Then you can learn about taxes, loans and how a proper CV has to look like.
And I disagree with "it decides how your life goes" thing.
You decide how your life goes with the way you handle situations, yourself and your attitude, other people.
Besides, I am in Academia and 90% of the stuff in my studies doesn't fly into my brain by itself. I put hard work and many hours into it.
Whenever you wanna achieve something, guess what, you have to put work and time into it. Doesn't really matter if you like or not - if you want it, work for it.
It has never been different.
Bill Gates has no academic degree or title. Just saying...
I really hate the whole "*insert famous person* Has no grades or anything1!!" argument, not everyone in the bloody world is the equivalent of someone like Bill Gates.
If you're implying that I'm not working hard I can assure you that I am, I'm putting in shit tons of effort and have been fucked over by my school which is the reason I don't have the grades I want, my year was the year they changed everything up and decided to raise the amount of marks you need to get on tests to pass, if I had been in my school a year earlier I would have actually passed my test, however, they keep raising and raising the grades so that every time I fail I have to do triple the amount of effort just to bloody catch up, I also didn't have a teacher for three fucking years in math, which isn't a subject I'm naturally good at. Nobody in my school got the grades they wanted to achieve, they received lower grades than they wanted to. Some of them received grades that were good enough, some of them didn't.
In my Drama exam we had three examiners all examining each other, thus we were all marked incredibly harshly. In History I was told that I was on track to get a B, I was revising after school hours and in school hours, even showed up during holiday's to do work and still, I failed the test.
Not everyone in the world is amazing at doing a written test that WILL for the most part decide who will hire you. I'm one of the people that isn't good at it and I've been fucked by this awful system so many times I've lost track of it.
Every time I hit the bar I previously needed to they raise it once more, that's not a system that encourages anyone to succeed, all that does is cause failure and disheartened minds.
Also, when you apply for jobs, you submit a CV do you not? That gives them your grades and other shit like that, they are not interviewing you, they are looking at a sheet of paper ABOUT you, if face to face, I'm more than certain I could do fine and get in, however that's not how applying for a job goes, they look at the grades and then decide if they want you or not to be interviewed (Basic element of how it goes based on what my parents have told me)
Learning how to learn is something you should be doing in pre-school and primary school, you don't need to repeat the same bullshit for the first 16 years of your life. (College and Uni aren't included in this as they are optional choices) Pre-school and Primary school are fair enough, it teaches you the basics of each subject such as English and Math, those are important skills, however, in secondary school we should be learning about life, not the same stuff we did before, and if we do, it should be by choice, not force. I don't know how it works in other countries, but we have essential subjects (Science, Math, English) And then we picked three that we wanted to do (In my case, History, IT and Drama) so, in Secondary School, should the essential subjects not be something like Taxes, CV creation and applying for jobs (Random stuff, this is just on the spot so don't look too hard into these) and then you can CHOOSE whether you want to do Science Math or English if you would like to continue down those specific rows in your career.
I'm not saying this should be the system but it's just a basic idea of a different system to the one we have now in terms of learning. My point is that everything is about exams, and it shouldn't be.