What you don't learn in school.

There is a quote by Neil Gaiman in regards to what you don't learn in school, and it goes like this:

"I've been making a list of the things they don't teach you at school. They don't teach you how to love somebody. They don't teach you how to be famous. They don't teach you how to be rich or how to be poor. They don't teach you how to walk away from someone you don't love any longer. They don't teach you how to know what's going on in someone else's mind. They don't teach you what to say to someone who's dying. They don't teach you anything worth knowing."

My first year of college is nearly over. I've been making my own personal list of what I didn't learn in school that maybe I should have, and it goes like this:

• What to do when you meet someone whose brain is built differently than yours
• How to know what you want to do with your life
• What to do when the thing you want to do with your life or the thing you're best at is highly unlikely to get you a job of any kind
• Anything involving human nature (and not even what I think it's like. I mean I've never heard any attempts at expressing any beliefs or ideas about human nature.)
• What makes "good art" good and how to manifest the goodness of good art in the things you do (whether it's art or life in general, because a lot of the principles of art are worth thinking about in other pursuits)
• How to feel
• How to think 
• Why the poets and writers really wrote all the things they have you read
• The various gender and sexual identities out there, thus allowing you to figure out how you want to identify and making it less awkward when your identity is "different" than the norm
• The various political beliefs out there, thus allowing you to figure out exactly what you believe and how to go about believing it (in my government class, we learned about how the government process works but not what exact beliefs there were about different topics, and I'm not sure I can ever forgive that mistake on his part. He was a great guy otherwise but he didn't give us any of the tools to go out and have beliefs.)
• Anything involving money
• What to do when you don't love or care about anything and have to pretend that you love or care about something to keep yourself functional
• What to do when you're so angry at something (anything - people, society, your friends, your family, bad things that happen, school) that you just want to go kill everything and everyone or stop living or start a futile revolution or even just yell at everyone in a very violent manner and make life a little less pleasant and a little more unnerving for everyone
• Why anyone does anything

School is important. Don't get me wrong. Being in school teaches you some things, such as how to get along with people you don't like, how to be responsible in areas like doing your homework, and how to listen to authority and (if you have anything resembling a mind of your own and anything resembling opinions or beliefs that differ from authority's) when to listen to them and when not to and the best way to work around authority when something you believe genuinely clashes with what you're being asked to do. And even some of the actual lessons, like history or science, will show you some of the ways in which the world works or give you an idea of how we got where we are or how things physically happen.

They just won't teach you about the things that matter.