Much of what I learned in school has been useful. But then there has been a lot that has been completely useless; which I have never had cause to use. It occurs to me that there are several other useful things that they could have taught us but never mind that. Here are all the things that I learned in school and never used again:
Yes all of it (and this isn’t just because I loathed algebra and was terrible at it). All my years on earth and never once have I ever thought oh thank goodness I they taught me this algebraic equation because I can now apply it to my life.
No job I did ever needed me to know about mitochondria. The detailed knowledge of the parts of a cell and the ability to draw it cannot be considered a useful life skill. For someone like me, who is terrible at drawing and did not make a career in biology, it was less than useless.
Flowers have anther, style, stigma, carpel, stamen etc. I remember this from school but don’t know why I was taught it. What possible use did they envisage I would make of this knowledge?
When I was in school, there were 22 states. Today there are 29 – sorry 28 now after the abrogation of article 370. I'm glad I know the states and capitals, but this is clearly a work in progress!
Sanskrit was presented to us as a ‘scoring subject’ but it wasn’t ‘scoring’ for me. It also wasn’t much use to me, except that I learned to call people animal names – donkey, money, dog etc. – in slightly more erudite sounding ways.
Yes, all of it was completely useless. Whatever I learned was already obsolete by the time I actually needed to use it in the course of work. And floppy disks --- what are those? Also why are they not floppy?
Messy ink pens got ink on my fingers, blotted countless notebooks and ruined many uniforms, but did little else. If it was meant to improve my handwriting it was unsuccessful. My handwriting is still a barely legible scrawl. Thank you word processors, for rendering my thoughts legible!
Time management, doing our taxes, starting a business, investments… these would have been more useful to be than knowing about the Pythagoras theorem or leaning the periodic table. Critical thinking, basic manners, basic cooking, first aid… these are actual skills that my school should have taught me but didn’t.
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