In Defense of Learning Things You'll Never 'Use'
"When will I ever use this?" is the most reasonable-sounding question in education — and one of the most misguided. A defense of the beautiful, useless things.
"When will I ever use this?" is the most reasonable-sounding question in education — and one of the most misguided.
The question every student asks
At some point, in some classroom, every student leans back and asks the question that feels like checkmate: when will I ever actually use this? The quadratic formula, the date of a treaty, the structure of a sonnet, the parts of a cell. It is a fair question, and the honest answer is often: directly, almost never. You will not be ambushed in adulthood by a sudden need to dissect a poem.
But the question smuggles in a false assumption — that the only reason to learn something is to use it later, like a tool you keep in a drawer. By that logic we should also stop lifting weights we will never lift again, or running races that lead nowhere. We understand instinctively that the gym is not about the specific dumbbell. The classroom is the gym for the mind, and almost nobody applies the same logic to it.
The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled.
What the 'useless' subjects build
Learning a hard proof you will forget still leaves something behind: the experience of holding a complex structure in your head and following it to the end. Reading a difficult novel you will never reference again rewires how you understand other people. Music you will never perform professionally trains patience, pattern and feeling all at once. The specific content washes out; the capability stays. We just never see the capability being deposited, so we assume nothing happened.
This is the deep case for a broad education over a narrow one. The narrowly trained mind is brilliant until the world changes shape, at which point it is stranded. The broadly built mind has spare parts — analogies, patterns, ways of seeing borrowed from a dozen fields — and can rebuild itself for whatever shows up. In a century of constant change, the 'useless' subjects turn out to be the most practical preparation of all.
Beauty is a reason
There is also a simpler defense we are oddly embarrassed to make: some things are worth learning because they are beautiful, and a life with more beauty in it is a better life. We do not ask what a sunset is for. We should be no quicker to ask what a symphony, a theorem, or a great poem is for. They are part of the inheritance of being human, and to be handed that inheritance and refuse it because it is not 'useful' is a kind of poverty.
A classical composer spent years getting a passage exactly right not because it would be useful but because it would be true and beautiful — and centuries later it still moves strangers to tears. Learning to receive that, to be the kind of person who can be moved by it, is not a waste of a Tuesday afternoon. It is close to the whole point.
The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.
The person it makes you
Here is the thing nobody tells the student rolling their eyes at the worksheet: the point was never the trigonometry. It was the person doing the trigonometry. The struggle, the small daily act of stretching a mind past where it wanted to stop, is quietly assembling a more capable, more patient, more curious human — one better equipped for every hard thing adulthood will eventually hand them, including the ones nobody can name yet.
So learn the useless thing. Read the book you will forget. Sit with the proof that leads nowhere. You are not collecting facts to be used later. You are becoming someone, one difficult, beautiful, 'pointless' lesson at a time.
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