Useless Subjects

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I can understand the English accent pretty well...
but maybe that's because my grandma's from London....

But they don't learn from it. Even when people try to learn (Like the goverment TRIED to learn from WW1 and not jump to war right away), they still make mistakes (Like Hilter trampling all over them)
It's a lose lose situation in my opinion.

I think it sucks that it's mandorary. I think it's an awesome course if you're interested, but I can see why you think it's pointless.

The thing is, a lot of subjects are "useless" in regards to everyday life. Higher mathematics, science, and literary skills are completely useless to the layperson; I don't go about my day needing the quadratic formula or having to know endosymbiotic theory.

But it's simply good to know and learn things, if for no other reason than to broaden our understanding of the world around us.

Disagree on public speaking. It's a useful tool in many careers and situations and is something that a lot of people need to be taught in order to become comfortable. Having the ability to babble in front of an audience is pretty rare. For most people, public speaking is as much about preparing and setting up so that they don't get lost when they get nervous as it is actually presenting the speech.

If nothing else, the average person just improves with practice.

Literature classes in high school. If someone hasn't developed an interest in reading by 7th grade that person probably never will.

I agree that literature is useless, I think anything you can test out of is useless. I don't actually learn anything in English class, but History is semi-useful because it gives you something to compare today by. Career-tech classes (drafting, networking, programming) are awesome though. Oh, and biology is the worst science, its just rote memorization.

I don't agree at all that history is useless. it has so much more to it than just trying ot learn from past mistakes. but studying history you can also gain a better perspective on yourself and your own culture and gain a better understanding of the world we live in. I like to say that if we dont' know where we came from we have no idea where we are going.


By understanding past technologies you can understand current ones better and the strengths of older technologies over modern ones. you can also find out a lot more useful information about events by reading accounts written closer to the time of the event or by the people you are researching. I would invite you to try it sometime compare a source that was alive to be there themselves to someone that decided to write a book about it today its like night and day.

also once you start reading works written in the 30s and before the 30s you will see that people in america were a lot more literate and educated than today and their works are a lot more interesting to read and the thoughts a lot more lucid. even the newspapers were written in a much more rich and descriptive language than today.

as far as english lit goes I'm very glad to have had it as the stuff we had ot read did expand my imagination a lot (not that I wasn't always reading every chance I got anyway.) I think theres a lot to learn from reading good fiction. the problem is that most people in school theses days dont want to make the most out of it. they only want to pass the test and move on like its a game. actually wanting to really learn is discouraged both by the teachers and the students (particularly the students) the whole system is designed for you to get enough to answer simple test questions mainly form memorization. and not actual intelligent thought.

I think education should be centered around first teaching the primary skills of reading and writing and math
but then adding on to it and perhaps in the mix from day one should be thinking people should be taught to seek out information and learn from it not just memorize for a test but to actually use the information they gather to apply it to a real world situation. from day one. I eventually got this skill and thanks to a really good library system I taught myself pretty much everything useful I know today.

just about everything is useless to someone. calculus is useless to someone who wants to study literature, art is useless for someone who wants to study computer engineering, etc.. calculus is extremely useful to me because i need it to get through my program at university (engineering, electrical trying to switch into civil)... even though i probably won't do any calculus after university because i'll have computers to do most of that crap.

I actually understand english accents much better than merican-english and I grew up here. I often find myself adopting the accent if I have heard it recently the same goes for other accents. I pretty much mimic other people's speech patterns.

Lol, I do that too, and I swear I don't realize it most of the time. I was once talking to someone with a deep southern accent and she got really offended. . . apparently she thought i was mocking her...

That is so so incorrect. Take it back.

hmm... well seeing as my chem teacher was the one who said that all the time, he might have been a bit biased
I'll concede that maybe bio is interesting at an advanced level, but all my highschool IB(like AP or honors) class did was memorize vocab and pics from the textbook. physics and chemistry were more logical and all the equations kept my interest.

From grades 1-12 it's pretty hard to determine who will be good at what. Even by grade 6 people are changing and new talents are emerging as the brain matures.

Besides, a brain that does only a few things gets tired. I liked math and science in high school, but I read comic books in grade school and moved to scifi novels by junior high. In senior high I enjoyed some of the stories of Mark Twain and Alexandre Dumas as well as western novels by Louis L'Amour. It gave me something to think about besides the electronic chart of the elements or geometry. Sort of a vacation. A blend of history, math, science, literature, and art is good for the mind.

PE was a joke because the teachers/coaches I saw were as immature as the students when I had problems or didn't know the rules. I had PE from grades 7 to 10 and no one told me what the rules for basketball were. In any other subject, the teacher would be fired.

I have nothing against philosophy in itself, but I think that the philosophical needs vary with the field in which we study, i.e. a computer engineer wouldn't have the same needs as a physicist, and still, the physicist won't have the same needs as the physician would have; all philosophy courses are common to everyone...

Literature is useless unless it interests you, I am sad to say, although English composition is essential.

I think that the higher maths should be optional. They are great things, the trigonometries and calculi, but only future engineers will find them fun and useful.

History and Geography should be compulsory. It is important that students understand the world they live in and how it came to be.

I am going to argue that philosophy should be compulsory, as odd as that sounds. Do not, my people, freak out about the "abstraction" in that subject. Philosophy is one of the most misunderstood subjects; it is not a lot of nebulous, poetic musings about how there is no reality. It is in fact Greek for "teaching people to think logically about everything", which is invaluable.