In honor of my son graduating from high school next week, I want to share a some gems of wisdom I stumbled upon.

This list is the work of Charles J. Sykes, author of the 1996 book Dumbing Down Our Kids: Why American Children Feel Good About Themselves But Can't Read, Write, Or Add, and the 2007 book 50 Rules Kids Won't Learn in School: Real-World Antidotes to Feel-Good Education.

Here are fourteen of those rules.

Rule 1
Life is not fair; get used to it.

Rule 2
The world won't care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something before you feel good about yourself.

Rule 3
You will not make 40 thousand dollars a year right out of high school.You won't be a vice president with a car phone until you *earn* both.

Rule 4
If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss. He doesn't have tenure.

Rule 5
Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your grandparents had a different word for burger-flipping; they called it opportunity.

Rule 6
If you screw up, it's not your parents' fault so don't whine about your mistakes. Learn from them.

Rule 7
Before you were born, your parents weren't as boring as they are now. They got that way paying your bills, cleaning your room, and listening to you tell them how idealistic you are. So before you save the rain forest from the blood-sucking parasites of your parents' generation, try delousing the closet in your own room.

Rule 8
Your school may have done away with winners and losers but life has not. In some schools they have abolished failing grades, they'll give you as many times as you want to get the right answer. This, of course, bears no resemblance to anything in real life.

Rule 9
Life is not divided into semesters. You don't get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you find yourself. Do that on your own time.

Rule 10
Television is not real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.

Rule 11
Be nice to nerds. Chances are you'll end up working for one.

Rule No. 12: Smoking does not make you look cool. It makes you look moronic. Next time you're out cruising, watch an 11-year-old with a butt in his mouth. That's what you look like to anyone over 20. Ditto for "expressing yourself" with purple hair and/or pierced body parts.

Rule No. 13: You are not immortal. (See Rule No. 12.) If you are under the impression that living fast, dying young and leaving a beautiful corpse is romantic, you obviously haven't seen one of your peers at room temperature lately.

Rule No. 14: Enjoy this while you can. Sure parents are a pain, school's a bother, and life is depressing. But someday you'll realize how wonderful it was to be a kid. Maybe you should start now. You're welcome.

Good advice to both high school and college graduates.

Feel free to add a few rules of your own.

Brock