Why Do Kids Learn ‘Useless’ Subjects In School? It’s Not About The Content
The crinkle of a cheese puff bag echoed from the backseat as I pulled out of the elementary school parking lot last month, and my 11-year-old son dumped his crumpled social studies worksheet onto the center console. “Why do I even need to memorize the names of Mesopotamia’s two main rivers?” he said, slumping down into the seat. “I’m gonna be a game developer when I grow up. When am I ever gonna use this?”
I almost gave him the automatic reply I’d given a hundred times before: Just do the work, grades matter, stop complaining. But I paused, because I’d just watched him spend three straight weekends troubleshooting his new custom gaming PC two weeks before, and the connection hit me before I could overthink it. I said, “Remember when you got all the parts put together, hit the power button, and nothing happened? No fans, no lights, nothing?”
He rolled his eyes. “Yeah. I thought I broke the whole thing.”
“What did you do first?” I asked.
He shrugged, picking crumbs off his hoodie. “Wrote down all the parts that could be broken, watched a bunch of videos, crossed off the ones I tested one by one until I figured out the power cord I ordered was the wrong wattage.”
“That’s exactly what you’re doing on this worksheet right now,” I said. I tapped the paper, where he’d been sorting four ancient civilizations by location, resources, and political structure. “You’re taking a bunch of random new facts, sorting them into patterns, comparing different groups, and figuring out how they fit together. That’s the same skill you used to fix your PC. If you can do that with old civilizations, you can do that when you’re troubleshooting a broken line of code for your game, or comparing five different graphics cards to buy for your next build. The names of the rivers don’t matter. The thinking does.”
He went quiet for the rest of the drive, which was more of a win than I expected. I’ve thought a lot about this conversation since, because I remember being his age, complaining to my own mom about why I needed to learn trigonometry when I wanted to draw for a living. I was right, actually. I’ve never once used sine or cosine in my 15 years as a graphic designer. But I use the problem-solving muscle I built working through those trig problems every single day, when a client hates three versions of a logo and I have to rearrange elements one by one to figure out what’s not working. That skill didn’t come from nowhere. It came from practicing on problems that felt useless at the time.
A lot of parents I talk to agree with their kids that too many school subjects feel irrelevant. And it’s fair to ask why we don’t just teach thinking skills through the stuff kids already care about, like coding or sports or art. But the thing is, your brain gets stronger by practicing skills in unfamiliar, new contexts. If you only practice sorting and problem solving when you’re building PCs or coding games, you don’t learn how to pull that skill out and use it on something you’ve never encountered before—like figuring out a conflict with a friend, or fixing a broken bike, or sorting through conflicting information about something that matters to you later in life. School gives you that practice, on all kinds of random topics, because that’s how you build a thinking brain that can handle anything.
After that car ride, I started making three small shifts in how I talk about homework with my son, and it’s cut down on complaining more than I thought it would. None of it takes extra time, it’s just changing how I frame things. First, when he says a subject is useless, I don’t argue with him. I just connect the work he’s doing right now to something he cares about. Last week he complained that learning the rock cycle was a waste of time because he’d never be a geologist. I pointed out he’d just spent three weekends testing different filament temperatures to stop his new 3D printer from clogging, sorting different plastic types by how they melted and flowed. That’s exactly what the rock cycle is—observing how materials change under different conditions and sorting them into patterns. He nodded, and went back to his worksheet without any more complaining.
Second, I stopped leading with “what grade did you get?” when he gets in the car. I ask “what’s the hardest thing you figured out how to do today?” It shifts the focus from memorizing content to the thinking process, which is the whole point. Some days he says everything was easy, and that’s fine. More often, he’ll launch into a story about how he solved a tricky math problem or sorted out a messy group project, and he’s proud of the work he did to figure it out, not just the final answer.
Third, I talk through my own problem solving out loud when I’m working on things around the house. When I was fixing the leaky kitchen faucet last month, I said “okay, two videos say two different things, let me write both solutions down and test the easier one first.” It shows him that thinking through problems is the skill we use every day, not just for school homework.
Last week he came home and told me his social studies group project fell apart, and he had to reorganize all their messy notes the night before it was due. He said it was annoying, but he just sorted all the information the same way he sorts his game mods, and it got done faster than he expected. I didn’t give him a big “see? I told you so” speech. We just got ice cream after soccer practice like we always do.
He still complains about useless homework sometimes. I still don’t blame him. A lot of the content he memorizes this year will be gone from his brain by next year. But the practice he’s getting showing up, working through problems that don’t feel important, and teaching his brain how to think through new things? That’ll stick around, long after the Tigris and Euphrates names fade. We’re still figuring it out, but this works for us right now.
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