In the United States, children are mandated to complete primary, secondary, and statutory formal education in order to be semi-successful throughout their life. However, how important is the actual education given rather than the piece of paper saying that you’ve completed your required schooling. Pre-university education fails to provide students with sufficient skills needed in the real world because of failure to fund programs and teachers, focusing too much on standardized testing and providing an equal learning opportunity for children who may not pick up on ideas as well as others. While pre-university education is seen as a positive influence in many students lives, it sometimes does not provide for every student’s intellectual needs.…show more content… being able to have a job and support both themselves and others. However, many schools fail to give their students these assets due to incomplete funding for school programs and staff. An example of this loss for students can be seen in The Sanctuary of School by Lynda Barry. In this passage, Barry explains to her audience the lack of financial stability in both her home life as well as her school life, which overall led to the defunding of the art program, a program she found much joy in. Barry states, “If parents are neglectful temporarily or permanently… it’s certainly sad, but their unlucky children must fend for themselves” (856). By defunding programs such as art or music, the school may be taking away the only outlet of joy a student has which overall may affect their ability to pick up on these critical skills. Therefore, this is a key staple in teaching children these valued skills needed in the workforce and without programs or positively rated staff, the children suffer in their educatory…show more content… A student who is less susceptible to retaining new information is forced to turn to other forms of information rather than the provided public schooling. In Hidden Intellectualism, Graff shows how he had gained intellectualism, not through the public education system but from the sources he sees every day such as sports and magazines. Graff states, “Until I entered college, I hated books and cared for only sports… that my preference for sports over schoolwork was not anti-intellectualism so much as intellectualism for other means” (958). By stating this, Graff shows how when schooling failed to provide a successful education, he had to turn to other means of