The more useless the better..?

If you couldn’t already tell, most things you learn in school are completely useless, at least in the pragmatic sense. And from experience, schools get this terribly wrong.

The humanities: History, Geography - who cares? - and the palpably unpalatable spread of pre-tertiary sciences (including Math) simplified to the extent of being inaccurate at best and a white lie in most cases. Who would be so kind to interpret the (now) almost-incomprehensible works of Shakespeare written in the glory of Early Modern English? Not all things are made out of atoms, heck, no one knows what 95% of the universe’s mass-energy content are!

When you learn the curses of algebra in Math, your boring teacher instructs you to “solve” the equation $20x=23$, whatever “solve” means. And, upon asking what is the relevance of this morsel of a mess, you get something along the lines of:

“Imagine you have $23 and you have 20 friends to split it fairly with. How do you find out how much each friend gets?”

The caveat is: no one does math this way, and students know this. They’re certainly not dumb! For all intents and purposes, you would simply pull out a pocket calculator and be on your merry way. In either case, algebra or not, you would figure that

  1. You will need a lot of 5-cent coins.
  2. You don’t have 20 friends.
  3. You don’t have $23, and neither is your money meant for your friends.

A more dignified teacher would offer the circumstance that these problems are fundamentals for higher learning. But this reply is only ever so slightly more convincing than the last: you’re a humanities student forced to do Math because an arbitrarily-decided “holistic” curriculum says you must. What’s the point? And can we even begin to imagine the relevance of anything more complicated than that? Moreover, students that are already critical with the presentation of materials would hardly buy this.

Sure, maybe you could start solving quadratics, just as you begin to consider the effects of friction in free-body diagrams when the autarkic question says so. But this is just ignoring the elephant in the classroom: why should I care about any of these haphazardly defined circumstances now, as I would in the future?

As a science hobbyist, I personally don’t see myself using any of these in “real life” contexts, unlike what your education is trying (or tried) to convince you of.

The simple answer is that nothing you learn in school is immediately useful. Some teachers understand this, but most choose not to lament about this in the presence of hyperpragmatic students, of which this very quality is emblazoned on their sleeves by the characteristic pursuit of grades. And, how common is a genuine inquiry delegated to an expedient appeal to academic performance and then efficiently dispatched for the sake of meeting teaching goals? Pretty ubiquitous, I’d say.

Student: Where did X come from?

Teacher: Don’t worry about X. You just need to be able to state and apply it in the exam.

And thus learning is shaped via this dogma of trust in the “system”: something is important and worth devoting time for if and only if it appears in the exam.

Dear educators, just say it and mean it. It’s not useful.

Yet, the core tenet of education is the belief learning is hardly useless! Learning is to the human brain like physical training is to dragonboaters. Rigorous training sessions include pushups, situps and the like for the sake of becoming more muscular - but they certainly don’t do either of those when rowing a boat! In the same way, learning is food for the brain: decades of science research affirm that consistent learning drives a persistent increase in transmission between neurons in our brain, in a process called long-term potentiation (useless knowledge, but you read it here!).

Students who struggle with crafting a coherent essay would most likely stumble when having to elucidate their thoughts and intent. And conversely, how else could students be perceptive of what others are communicating if they can hardly grasp the essence of a comprehension passage? Working through elementary math is itself a training in thorough thinking and precise communication through abstract notions: where numbers are preliminarily replaced by letters in the case of algebra. We wouldn’t expect someone to be able to work Excel spreadsheets or handle tax filings if they couldn’t rationalise the intricacies involved. History teaches us about causes and effects, and interpreting older texts is practise for argumentation and rationalising unfamiliar contexts.

The spread of examples is readily generalisable. What is quantifiably useful to students is hardly the content, but rather the neural equivalent of weightlifting.

Schools should be telling students that they would leave each course with a distinct set of skills. That, in itself is what 21-st century education should be, and is the main reason for a holistic curriculum: students need to be able to grapple with problems that are just as complicated and abstract as their course content, if not more so. After all, what is the point of a problem-solving toolbox if not for solving problems?

If its any reassurance, a vast majority of modern research effort is just as “useless” as the curriculum content taught in class (with the difference being that one is infinitely more interesting than the other). It is a no-brainer that understanding how the smallest building blocks of matter work or how gas in a suspension move in a “random and haphazard manner” is inconsequential to our everyday lives. Yet, these are advances that science geeks, hobbyists and scientists alike find most exciting! I argue that these “useless” morsels of scientific advancements are in and of itself encouragement broadcasted through a megaphone: these are poster-child examples that learning and intellectual pursuit are not half as transactional as people learn to believe! If the answer to “Why should I care about Y?” is “I don’t know”, then Y might just be something worth learning.

So please, go forth, read, learn and explore everything under the sun. Most importantly, have fun.

This post was heavily inspired by the national exams currently ongoing, and the fervent outcry of burnout experiences during said stressful period.

While we’re at it, I should also include my favorite scientific news for the year so far. Y. Cendez made the groundbreaking observation that a black hole ejected a large amount of matter nearly 2 years after chewing through a star, with the ejection going almost half the speed of light!