Why Do Kids Learn “Useless” Subjects In School? It’s About Teaching The Brain To Think
Last Tuesday, I was pulling out of the soccer park parking lot, my 10-year-old daughter Mia slouched in the backseat, cleats clicking against the plastic door, and she crumpled her social studies worksheet into a ball and threw it into the snack bag. “This is so stupid,” she said. “When am I ever going to need to know what ancient Mesopotamians traded for barley? Why do we have to learn useless stuff?”
I almost gave the answer I’ve given a dozen times before: Just do it for the grade, it won’t kill you. But I remembered the parent-teacher conference two weeks prior, so I held that thought and kept driving.
At that conference, Mia’s teacher Ms. Henderson, who brings a chipped coffee mug that says “Coffee First, Teach Second” to every meeting, laughed when I mentioned Mia’s constant complaining that half the stuff she learns is irrelevant. She said she hears that question at least once a month. Last year, a dad who works as a software engineer asked why kids waste time writing haikus when they should be learning coding instead. Ms. Henderson asked him to think about what you actually practice when you write a haiku: you get 17 syllables, you have to pick words that say more than they literally mean, you cut everything that doesn’t fit, and you condense a big idea into a small, clear package. That’s exactly what that dad does every single day when he writes clean, efficient code. He just never connected the two.
That conversation stuck with me, because I remembered my own high school experience. I was 16, already dead set on becoming an accountant, and I complained nonstop about my mandatory art history class. Why on earth would I ever need to tell the difference between Caravaggio and a random Renaissance painter? I crammed for the final, forgot half the names a week later, or so I thought. Three years ago, I had a new client who brought me a messy stack of receipts, five years of unorganized business expenses, half the dates were wrong, two different spreadsheets that didn’t match, and no clear structure. I sat down for three days, sorted through every piece, grouped similar costs, spotted the gaps, cross-checked receipts against spreadsheets, and built a clear report the IRS accepted. Halfway through that project, I realized that’s exactly what I did in art history class: we got 20 unlabeled slides of 17th century paintings, we had to sort them into Baroque, Rococo, and Neoclassical based on their attributes, cross-check against what the textbook said, and spot the ones that were mislabeled. I haven’t named a painting in my job in 20 years, but I use that skill of sorting messy, conflicting information every single week. I just never connected the dots until that chat with Ms. Henderson.
I saw that connection clearly a month later, watching Mia work on her Lego rocket for the science fair. The instructions were missing a step, the base kept wobbling, and she was ready to throw the whole box across the living room. Then she stopped, wiped her sweaty hands on her sweatpants, and went back to the start. She laid out all the pieces one by one, checked each step she’d already finished, figured out where she’d put a wrong size brick, and tested the base again before she added the upper stage. That’s exactly the skill she was practicing on that Mesopotamia worksheet: sort conflicting sources, check for mistakes, build a clear argument step by step. It doesn’t matter that the topic was 5,000-year-old barley. The workout was for her brain, not for her future career as a Middle Eastern historian.
I used to brush off my kid’s complaints and tell her to just get through it. Now I do two simple, small things that take almost no extra time. First, when she says a subject is useless, I don’t argue. I just ask: “What are you practicing doing here, that isn’t about this topic?” That Tuesday in the car, after she complained about the worksheet, I asked that question. She sat quiet for a minute, uncrumbled the paper, and said, “Ms. Henderson made us compare two different old sources, one said trade routes went east and one said west. We had to prove which one was right. So I guess… I’m practicing figuring out when someone’s wrong even if they wrote it in a book?” That’s it. That’s the whole point. After that, she folded the worksheet up and put it in her binder, no more complaining. Second, when I check her homework, I don’t just ask if she got the answer right. I ask, “What was the hardest part to work through?” That gets her talking about the process of thinking, not just memorizing a fact for a test. It takes 30 extra seconds, no big planning required.
I’m not saying every single worksheet schools assign is secretly brilliant. Some days the homework is just mindless filler, and even I think it’s a waste of time. What I am saying is that the core idea of school—teaching all these different subjects that seem irrelevant to most kids’ futures—isn’t broken. It’s not about the facts. It’s about giving your brain different kinds of workouts. You don’t go to the gym and lift a 10-pound weight because you need to carry that 10-pound weight around for the rest of your life. You lift it to make your muscles stronger for anything you need to carry later. Same with school.
Last night, Mia was gluing fins onto her finished rocket, and she looked up and said, “This is just like that Mesopotamia thing, huh? I have to check every part before I move on.” I nodded, and kept folding the laundry that’s been piling up by the couch. We still have nights where she slams her notebook shut and says whatever she’s learning is the stupidest thing ever. I don’t give her a big speech about the value of education. I just ask that one question. Some days she gets it, some days she just rolls her eyes and finishes the work. That’s okay. We’re just taking it one homework assignment at a time.
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