Why Do Kids Learn ‘Useless’ Subjects At School? It’s Not About The Content – It’s About How To Think
The crinkle of Lila’s geometry textbook slamming shut cut through the hum of my windshield wipers mid-rainy commute home from school. “I’m telling you, this is all garbage,” she said, kicking a half-eaten bag of Goldfish across the floor mat. “When am I ever going to write a two-column proof for an isosceles triangle in real life? I want to be a graphic designer. Why am I wasting time on stuff that doesn’t matter?”
I was about to give the line I’d repeated a hundred times before: It’s a graduation requirement, or You need it to get into design school. But I stopped, because I’d had that exact same complaint about my own 10th grade chemistry class 25 years earlier. I wanted to be a writer, back then. I thought mixing reagents and writing formal lab reports was the biggest waste of time my school could have invented. I can still remember complaining to my mom that I’d never need to calculate the molar mass of anything once I left high school. And I was right – I haven’t calculated molar mass once in my adult life.
But back in March, I was on a tight deadline to fix the budget for the after-school program I run at our local non-profit. We had a $1200 gap I couldn’t track down, and the grant manager was emailing me every two hours asking for an update. At first I jumped around, checking deposit receipts, scanning invoices, panicking because I couldn’t find the error fast enough. Then something clicked, and I slowed down. I started with what I knew for sure: the total income matched our bank statement, so the error had to be in how I allocated funds to the three different programs. I wrote down my hypothesis, tested each line item one by one, and 18 minutes later I found it – I’d entered the same $1200 supply grant on two different program budgets. That slow, step-by-step process wasn’t something I learned at my first office job. That was the scientific method, drilled into me by hundreds of lab reports I thought were useless. I’d never thought about it consciously, but the habit was there, built by all that “irrelevant” work.
That’s when I got what schools are actually doing when they make kids study all this content most of us will never use again. Those two-column proofs Lila hates aren’t about isosceles triangles. They’re about practicing how to start with what you know, build a logical chain to get to a conclusion that’s not obvious. That’s exactly what she does when a client sends her a vague request for a logo that “feels more trustworthy.” She can’t just jump to the end product. She has to test different color palettes, test different fonts, work step by step from what she knows the client needs to the final design. That’s the skill geometry is teaching her, not the proof itself.
A lot of parents, me included for a long time, sort of agree with our kids that a lot of school content is useless. We joke about it over dinner: When was the last time you used algebra? That makes total sense, because most of the content will never come up again in our daily lives. But what we rarely point out to our kids is that the point was never the content. The point is practicing how to think through hard, messy, unfamiliar stuff.
There are two small, easy things I’ve started doing when Lila complains that I didn’t do before, and they’ve made a bigger difference than I expected. First, I don’t just repeat the “you need it for college” line. Instead, I ask her to tell me what the hardest part of the work is right now, then help her connect that hard part to something she cares about outside of school. When she complained about geometry that rainy day, I said, “Remember last week when you spent an hour trying to figure out why your new Procreate brush wasn’t drawing straight lines? You went through every setting one by one, toggled everything, until you found you’d accidentally turned on perspective mode. That’s exactly what you’re doing when you write these proofs. You’re practicing that slow, methodical problem solving for stuff that matters to your design work.” It’s concrete, it’s personal, and it doesn’t feel like a lecture.
The second small shift is that I sometimes swap my usual “what did you learn today?” question for “what’s one hard problem you worked through today?” It shifts the whole conversation away from memorizing facts to the thinking work, and it only takes 10 extra seconds.
A week after that car ride, Lila was doing homework at the kitchen table, I was folding laundry next to her, sipping cold coffee I’d forgotten to reheat. She paused, tapped her pencil on her textbook, and said, “Wait a second. This stupid proof is just like when I had to figure out why my YouTube upload kept failing last week. I started with what I knew, eliminated stuff one by one, until I found the export setting was wrong.” I just nodded. I didn’t say I told you so. That doesn’t help anyone.
She still complains about school all the time. Last night she was ranting about having to read Julius Caesar for English, said it’s boring and she doesn’t care what Brutus did. I didn’t say anything about how it teaches her to analyze unspoken motivation and read between the lines, which is exactly what she does when she deciphers a client’s vague feedback. She’ll connect that dot herself when she’s ready. Some days I still wonder if the school curriculum could be structured a little better, if there’s a way to make that thinking practice more obvious instead of hiding it behind all the “irrelevant” content. But for now, this small shift in how we talk about it works. Lila still doesn’t like geometry, but she doesn’t see it as a total waste anymore. And that’s enough for right now.
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