Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Charles Warcup's avatar

Talking of learning things because they'll be ‘important later on’, I fell for that in a big way fifty years ago. I was quite good at maths at school and believed people who told me that maths is an absolute essential. I even studied it, nearly failed my degree because it turned out that university-level maths has little to do with school maths, and became a maths teacher because ... well ... what else could I do? And, of course, I'd been told everyone ought to do maths because it is an absolute essential. So I told my pupils that everyone ought to do maths because it is an absolute essential.

I soon left teaching (still vaguely believing that everyone ought to do maths because it is an absolute essential, though initial doubts were at last beginning to sprout) and ended up in a technically-biased civil service job in water management working with computers. Just the sort of place where you'ld expect all that maths to come in useful. It didn't. At least not remotely such as to justify all that time I'd spent learning it, studying it and teaching it.

Now I believe that maths is an absolute essential for an extremely small proportion of people who are interested in it, and these days the rest of us can ask an AI bot.

Sorry if this sounds a bit exaggerated when compressed into a short comment, so take it with a pinch of salt. But the bottom line remains: Let's stop traumatizing people with fairy stories about having to do ... [replace the dots with a school subject of your choice] whether you're motivated or not because it's an absolute essential.

Expand full comment
Megan Baker's avatar

“What does education often do?” Henry David Thoreau asked in his journal, answering: “It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook.” Indeed. The way I think I'll put it from now on, aside from this wonderful quote, is: Telling a young person what to be interested in is a fool-proof recipe for apathy.

Expand full comment
6 more comments...

No posts