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Hey Pandas, What Is Something Teachers/School Taught/Told You That You Have Never Needed To Use Outside Of School?
We all learned stupid or useful things in school. In some cases, you don't even use most of the things learned there. People tend to claim such isn't true but the education system needs just a little bit of tinkering.
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Personally, I can tell you all about world history, American History and the politics/economics of the world. Have I used it yet? No. But I have been able to hyperfixate and talk my friends and family's ears off with this knowledge.
I think that history if done well is very important to understand social movements and to avoid repeating past mistakes like sexism or fascism. But it needs to be a general history focused on general changes and social movements not the kind of "the 2th o february in 1492 the queen of..."
Square roots. I always hated them and are completely useless in real life. Same with integrals and derivatives (which I actually enjoyed doing). They are solely used in very specific careers and should be learned at the university.
Chemustry formulation. Understanding the basic structure of the world (atoms, mollecules and such) is important but knowing formulation is only useful in very few careers. The kids in my country learn it from 12 on but I think that it should only be learned in science high school.
The kids in my country in middle school also need to learn very complex geology and things like the structure of the tissues of plants, which again is useless in real life. But they only learn anatomy very young (and we forget it) and they never learn any basic health. The only ones to learn about things like cancer or proper nutrition are the ones who take biology in HS
Philosophy. Don’t misunderstand me. I think that ethics and debate are very interesting and important subjects for school. But the way we had this class was to memorise the texts of classic philosophers without any chance to chose them or debate their ideas. Our teacher was a christian fundamentalist and only chose “church approved” philosophers like Descartes or Rousseau. He even said once that “my ideas were dangerous” when somebody mentioned euthanasia and I defended it. At the end it was just “catholic class 2.0”. A total waste of time.
Quadratic equations - why? Forced myself to get the basics just to pass the maths exam!
Can I remember how to do them - NO!
Do I need them in everyday life - NO!
Was it with the tears and frustration - NO!
Don’t get me started on the curved lines on a graph. I didn’t care then and I don’t care now!
Almost everything. Or at least the way they are teaching it. Never needed anything more than basic mathematics in my life and I don’t do anything that’s connected to Geography so I really didn’t need to memorize the length of the border between South and North Korea. So I got out of school without basic knowledge that I would actually need. I believe that’s everywhere.
Something that they need to add to schools curriculums asap is basic informatics. Nowadays everybody needs to know how to navigate windows and use office (to an extent, excel can be super complex). I have met an incredible number of young people who is the whole day with the phone or tablet but can't use basic excel or format a computer (important to keep your oc running and super easy in the modern windows). We all need this for our future and more the next generations.
But instead our curriculums in europe are basically based on early 20th century schools and teach useless things mentioned here.
Everything, but especially history, i moved a lot between schools and ended up doing the normans and the tudors every time 😫 it was really boring, i learnt more from horrible histories on tv than writing down loads of boring dates
If anyone did the IB they might remember a little something called Theory of Knowledge where everyone tried to be philosophical and understand how we knew things and everyone wound up confused, even the teachers... I have no idea what it was for because the absolute best-case scenario was an existential crisis and the absolute worst was touching Religion as a way of knowing after you had been warned Not To Go There.
y=mx+b, y-y1=m(x-x1), a^2+b^=c^, c=(-b+- sqrt b-4ac)/2a...
basically all geometry.
