Schools Teach Useless Information, and That’s Okay
Why Kids Should Be Exposed to Knowledge They Won’t Need in “The Real World”
When I was in first or second grade, my teacher gave my peers and me straight pins and sheets of colored paper covered in dots. We knelt on the floor, poised our pins above each dot, and stabbed, intensely motivated by the knowledge that, when we were done, our papers would be taped to the window. Light would stream through the holes we’d made. We would see patterns. Our parents would be proud. I envied the kids who made it through two or three pin pictures while I toiled away at one. My self-esteem probably took a hit. And for what? I have never since jabbed a pin at sheets of construction paper.
Truth be told, I’ve never used a lot of the skills and information I learned in school. Most adults haven’t. This dismal fact prompts an endless stream of jokes and complaints.
“I don’t know how to do my taxes, but I know all about the quadratic formula.”
“I don’t know how to fill out a resume, but I can recite Shakespeare.”
“I don’t know how to rent an apartment, but I know that Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin.”
The fact is, most of us don’t need a great deal of the information we encountered in required courses. But that doesn’t mean schools should drop Calculus to make room for a How to File Your Taxes class. In the golden age of internet search engines, no teacher can compete with the merciful brevity of Wiki How pages and YouTube tutorials when it comes to imparting basic 21st century survival strategies. Want to know how to do laundry? Google it. Want to know how to fix a hole in your wall? Google it. Want to know how to change a flat tire or scramble an egg? Google it. Does that render public school obsolete? Not at all.
Shakespeare, Calculus, Choir. . . it all matters. We may not technically need those subjects, but we desperately need exposure to ideas and skills that most of us would never Google if left to our own devices.
Expanding Schemas
We each have our own set of schemas — beliefs about life and the world. Here’s one way to think about it: our perceptions of reality are like sheets of construction paper taped to a window. When we absorb a new idea or experience — useful or otherwise — we pierce the paper. A new pinprick of light appears. Groups of these pinpricks comprise schemas.
It’s true that, every time we learn something practical or research something fascinating, we puncture our sheets of paper, but the resulting dots of light tend to form random isolated clusters. Introducing concepts that don’t serve immediate needs or passions, formal education pushes us to sprinkle points of illumination in our worldviews’ darkest, blankest spaces. Patterns emerge.
Emerging Patterns
I remember precious little from my high school history classes, but I know that leaders rise and fall. Civilizations crave both freedom and stability. Human nature pushes us to challenge the status quo while simultaneously pulling us backward into comfortable justifications of unjust but profitable actions. Usually, we are tribalistic and territorial. Sometimes we are evil. Occasionally we are heroic.
I’ve forgotten Newton’s laws and the particulars of Gregor Mendel’s punnet square, but I’ve kept my sense of wonder where all things science are concerned. I see scientists as servants of an expanding body of objective truths. I value research. I trust that the scientific method functions as a safe bridge between existing knowledge and new discoveries.
I can’t recall the titles or authors of the poems, stories, and essays in my old literature books, but I remember my delight at strangers’ articulation of my private hopes and fears. I learned that, across centuries and cultures, people are people — complex mixes of good and bad who manage to maintain brilliant diversity while sharing humanity’s fundamentals.
A growing distance between me and the years I spent in public schools blurs my memory of tests I crammed for and essays I wrote. The points of light on my sheet of construction paper have become fuzzy. Maybe that’s not such a bad thing. As one indistinct pinprick blurs into the next, patterns become clearer and brighter, granting me light to see by and providing context for new ideas. With each stab of the pin, I become a little kinder, a little more discerning, a little less afraid of the dark.
