When Will I Ever Need To Know This?

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When Will I Ever Need To Know This?

                Quite often in middle school or high school, a student will not understand some material, grow frustrated, and then start to question the purpose of the material.  In socially acceptable speech, he will say to his classmates, “This is so stupid.  Why in the world do I need to know this garbage?”  It may be the makeup of a cell from biology, the significance of the Proclamation of 1763 in U.S. history, the integral of tan(x) in calculus, or infinite other topics from numerous other subjects.  At first glance, the student has a good point, as he will probably never need to know about something that happened almost 250 years ago.  Every student will quickly agree with you.  Why do they teach this kind of pointless material in schools?

                Teaching a student all the math in existence up through calculus is probably excessive in most cases.  However, there will probably, in most cases, never be a situation where the student wasn’t taught enough math to perform a task in the workforce.  Even in very high-education fields of study, such as medicine, it won’t matter what happened on the other side of the globe, one thousand years ago.  The more you think about this, almost everything learned in a high school education will have no use to a person in their real life.  What then, is the real purpose of the K-12 education system?

                A common debate among educators and curriculum developers across the country is whether this ‘useless’ material should be taught to students, or if they should only be taught information that will directly benefit them in their life beyond school.  The next question is what material is important for all students to know?  How do we decide what should be taught in this ‘purpose-driven’ education system?  The answer is that the only thing students really need to know is how to absorb and truly learn information which they will learn in college and on the job.  As there is no way to know exactly what field a particular student will go into, it is best to simply prepare him for whatever will come his way in his life.

                I believe that the purpose of high school is not to learn actual information and knowledge, but rather to learn how to learn.  In my opinion, high school is really just a long sequence of seemingly pointless courses which are really geared toward teaching students how to study and succeed in college and in their lives.  This worthless, useless, pointless material should be learned not for practical use, but for the sake of learning itself.  No matter how impractical a piece of information seems, an effort should be made to learn it, as the experience of learning this frustrating information is where the real learning occurs.