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yucktheduck

We all probably had the thought that "wait, I learned so many things I at school but there is literally nothing I learned at school that was useful." Do you guys think all that learning was necessary? I mean some things were useful like geometry and reading and writing but come one, I'm not going to do all the stuff I learned all the time.

anonymousdebater

Some information is useful. Other information is not. 

Erfisflat

Because when something is true and correct it must be hammered into the minds of defenseless children.

SilverishGoldNova

If we're talking about BS like evolution, the big bang, and the spherical Earth theory, then no. @Erfisflat

Fredsnephew

Is anything worth it?

We have the duration of our lives to fill with something.

agsr

One of the main benefits of school is not actually what you learn, but it teaches you and gives you stamina how to learn.

It also gives you a general foundation for the future.  That said, I personally believe that our education system needs to get rewritten for the new reality. We don't need to waste so much time with in classroom lectures and have a much higher percentage of time spend on more targeted individualized elearning.

Mike

The basics in education are fundamental to the advancement of a civil society. However, there is a subtle cancer in public education today, one of political indoctrination.

someone234

If you got home schooled then probably not. I learned so much about human beings in school that I believe any other want student ends up extremely good at psychology purely due to the forced social interaction with bullies, narcissists and/or suicidal Emos as well as variants of the norm that you get in school.

MayCaesar

A lot of the classes we take at schools help us much more than we realize. Consider two situations:
1. You get a new project on your job and have enough knowledge to complete it successfully.
2. You get a new project on your job and lack the knowledge sufficient to complete it.
In the first situation, you probably take your knowledge for granted; you do not think where your knowledge came from, you simply use it without much thinking. In the second situation, however, the lack of knowledge significantly impairs your ability to do your job, and that is when the questions start coming to your mind: "Why did they not teach this at school?"

This imbalance makes it very difficult to objectively see how much the material we learned at school is worth. What makes it even more difficult is that different people need different parts of what we all learn at school, depending on their: lifestyle, profession, hobbies, personal traits...

I would say that for me personally only math at high school was more or less immediately useful. Most of the math and almost all of the physics and programming I knew before entering an undergraduate program I learned by self-studying, since the school material was too simplistic and I quickly outgrew those classes and started seeking a more advanced material. And other disciplines probably merely broadened my perspective some. However, even that broadening is probably of more use than I realize: while I do not need to know, for example, the biology of mushrooms, pretty much, in any part of my life, knowing it broadens my view angle, allowing me to see new sides of certain entities by cross-matching them with what I know about mushrooms. Bits and pieces of knowledge that seem irrelevant at the first glance long-term may help tremendously with developing your intellectual abilities and with teaching you to think outside the box.

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All that said, the school education system definitely needs a serious revamp - and that applies to pretty much every school system in the world. I think school should focus more on raising strong and unique individuals with developed critical thinking and the drive to pursue new venues in life. The current system involve too much conformity and raise people without a strong individual backbone, people who are easily swayed by various appeals to their place in the society. It has always been the case, and it is probably less of the case nowadays than it was at any point in the past - but the differences are more quantitative than qualitative, in my opinion.