Why Kids Learn ‘Useless’ Subjects In School: It’s Not About The Content, It’s About How To Think
Last Tuesday, I was folding clean laundry at the kitchen table while my 8th grader, Javi, worked on social studies homework. His half-eaten bowl of mac and cheese was going cold next to his notebook, and the dog was chewing a hole in the leg of my old sweatpants when Javi slammed his pencil down hard enough to bounce his eraser off the table. “This is so stupid,” he said. “When am I ever gonna need to name 12 ancient Greek city-states and list their main exports? This is useless. I wanna be a game designer, not a history professor.”
I nodded, because I’ve thought the exact same thing about his homework a hundred times. There was a semester I complained so much about high school chemistry that my mom still brings it up at Christmas; I wanted to be a writer, what use was balancing chemical equations ever gonna be to me? I almost said “yeah, that does sound like a lot” before I stopped. I remembered three weeks earlier, standing in the doorway of Javi’s room watching him argue with his friends over Discord about his new Minecraft server map.
Twelve of his friends from school had all asked for custom player claims, and every single one wanted a different biome: some wanted forests for building treehouses, some wanted flat plains for farms, some wanted deserts for mesa bases. Javi had spent an hour moving spawn points one by one, complaining that no one was happy, when he suddenly went quiet. He typed out a list of everyone’s name and their requested biome, sorted the whole list by terrain type, then grouped all the similar claims together on the map, cutting travel time between spawns by half. Ten minutes later, everyone was happy.
I pushed the pile of socks aside and leaned over to his notebook. “Remember that Minecraft map you sorted out three weeks ago?” I said. He blinked, pulled out one earbud, and said “Yeah?” “What did you do to get that to work?” I asked. He shrugged. “I listed all their requests, sorted them by what they wanted, put the same types near each other. Duh.” “That’s exactly what you’re doing here,” I said, tapping his city-state worksheet. “You have 12 random names and facts, you’re sorting them by location and export, you’re gonna compare them at the end for the questions. That’s the same skill. You don’t have to remember Corinth exported pottery in 10 years. You just have to practice sorting facts right now.”
He stared at the worksheet for a minute, then rolled his eyes and picked his pencil back up. He still mumbled about it being stupid, but he finished it. I thought about that conversation at Javi’s parent-teacher conference a few days later, when I brought it up to his social studies teacher, Mr. Henderson. He laughed and said he gets that complaint at least once a week. “I don’t care if they remember the name of a single city-state 12 months from now,” he said. “I care that they can take 20 random pieces of information, organize them, spot patterns, and answer a question that asks them to compare two things. That’s not just for history class. That’s for when they’re comparing car insurance plans, or sorting out their budget for an apartment, or figuring out which job offer to take.”
That’s the part that most of us miss, right? We get so caught up on whether the content of a lesson is ever gonna come up again in real life that we forget the point isn’t the content. The point is the exercise. When you go for a run, you don’t do it because you need to get to the end of the block; you do it to make your heart and legs stronger. Doing a homework assignment that feels useless is the same thing: you’re working out your brain, practicing how to think through a problem, so when you have a real problem that matters, your brain is ready.
Most of the time, I still don’t remember how to balance a chemical equation from 10th grade chemistry. But I use the scientific method I learned there every single week for my job as a freelance copywriter. When I test three versions of an ad for a client, I change one variable at a time, measure the results, and adjust the next version based on what I learn. That’s exactly what I did for chemistry lab, even if I can’t name most of the elements anymore.
There’s three small things I’ve started doing since that kitchen table conversation, that any parent can do when their kid complains about useless homework. First, instead of agreeing with them that it’s stupid, or lecturing them that they need it for college, just ask: “What did you have to do to finish this assignment? Walk me through the steps.” It takes 30 seconds, and it helps them shift from focusing on the content to seeing the process they’re practicing. Second, connect that process to something they care about outside of school, like I connected the city-state sorting to Javi’s Minecraft map. If your kid just practiced ordering steps for a science worksheet, remind them that’s the same thing they did when they put together their new bike last weekend. Third, stop saying “they teach all this useless stuff” in front of your kids. It’s easy to complain about school with other parents, but that just reinforces the idea that only the immediate content matters, not the practice.
Javi still complains about homework, of course. Last night he slammed his science notebook shut complaining about having to draw and label the life cycle of a fern. “I’m never gonna be a botanist,” he said. I just asked him what steps he had to follow to get it done, he told me he had to sort the stages in order and label each part, I nodded at the new skateboard he built last weekend where he did the exact same thing to put all the parts together. He rolled his eyes and went back to drawing.
He’ll probably forget what a prothallus is by next month. That’s fine. The sorting, the ordering, the organizing? That’s what sticks. Some days I still wonder how much of the content he’ll actually hold onto long-term, but I’ve stopped worrying about the “useless” lessons. They’re not useless. They’re just practice. And practice is what makes thinking feel easy when it matters.
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