You'll probably never use this, but learn it anyhow
- Joanne Jacobs
- Dec 1, 2025
- 2 min read
I was fine with algebra and OK with geometry, but trigonometry broke my spirit. I asked the teacher why we needed to learn about cosines and secants and whatnot. He said if we went further in math we'd need it. I said: "I will take a sacred oath never to study any college subject that requires trig." He laughed.
My father said that if I were in training to be an artillery officer, I'd need trig to aim the guns, and if I couldn't do it I'd flunk out and have to be a private. "It's bad enough being an officer," he said. (But it's a lot better to be in the artillery than the infantry.)
I majored in English and Creative Writing in college, and did not serve in the Army.
"When am I ever going to use this?" is a common question, writes Brett Benson on SoL in the Wild. He gives his students an honest answer. You probably won't. You won't be measuring the height of flagpoles by their shadow or separating the anapests from the dactyls.
But, "learning content, whether it’s history, math, geography, literature, or science, builds the mind you’ll use in every area of life," he writes. "Knowledge gives you more examples to draw from, more context to understand new information, and more mental efficiency because your working memory doesn’t have to do everything from scratch."
Students who know more read better, decide better, solve better, and understand more. That’s especially true when life gets complex or unfamiliar, which, for most adults, is often.
Shared knowledge "lets people make sense of the world together," he tells students. Cultural literacy "helps you understand news, conversations, arguments, and events happening around you. You use that every day, even if you don’t notice it.” Learning "strengthens your mind and . . . helps you participate in the world with everyone else."
I'm not sure this applies to logarithms or the Krebs Cycle, though the latter did answer a crossword clue just the other day. But I have found that knowing things makes it a lot easier to understand new things.
The $981 billion per year (2023-2024 total) US K-12 credential industry is the second-largest (after China) command economy left on Earth. In abstract, the education industry is a highly unlikely candidate for necessarily rule-bound, bureaucratic State (i.e., government, generally) operation.
Children are not standard.
Parents, individually, making uncoerced decisions for their own children, will, in aggregate, out-perform central planners who know nothing of individual children's interests and abilities.
Knowledge is useful, but which knowledge to learn is a continually changing question. Jurisdictions around the world have differing answers to this last; I find it most useful to start with the International Baccalaureate organization's current programmes, since they are more broadly derived than any other, then steadily specify them as by the European Schools, Oxbridge international education, department of defence education activity, then various state, regional, and municipal foundations.
The problem, of course, is that teachers (and students) are rewarded by good regurgitation, at least up to the last test, not real learning or developing the ability to reason.
The complaints about "never using trig, etc." show a real ignorance of the value of having taken trig, Algebra, etc. They are the first, and most rigorous, exposure of the student to abstract thought, logic and reasoning.
Studying Shakespeare matters,…
I always told my students that you never know what you are going to need to know in life, even if knowing something only helps you to be able to talk intelligently to someone new at the dinner table.
I'm reminded of this post on "When are we ever gonna have to use this?"
https://rightontheleftcoast.blogspot.com/2006/02/when-are-we-ever-gonna-have-to-use.html