this post was submitted on 16 Dec 2024
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Nonsense
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funny, silly, whatevs.
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Older Millennial here.
I had to learn cursive, memorize the times table, and know the capital of every god damn state. I had to remember the order of planets. I had to memorize polygon names up to 20 and roman numeral math.
There's so many things I learned that I don't use on a day to day. Things I can pull out of my brain but if you made me apply it, I'll struggle for a bit, and scribble the answer on a piece of paper.
The one time the skills came in handy was when I was crushing a escape room.
I mean, broadly speaking there's no utility to knowing the planets or their order. There's no reason to know all the organs in the human body or the capital cities of all the states or the names of a hundred different dinosaurs or the events surrounding WW2.
But some of this stuff is just... fun to know. It gives you a knowledge base that lets you have an intelligent conversation with your peers and answers some broad existential questions about the world around you. And some of it is so foundational to your understanding of reality that - if you leave the teaching to the wrong people - you get some very ugly knock-on effects.
The guy who doesn't know what roman numerals are is much easier to sucker into a Facebook conspiracy theory when he starts seeing them show up in a conversation between Sovereign Citizens. Knowing times-tables is helpful for that base-line mental math that keeps you from getting scammed by a shady contractor or embarrassed when you try and calculate a tip at a restaurant. Knowing your planets at least blunts some of the absurd "Iranian Drone Mothership Harasses Innocent East Coast Dipshits" headlines CNN has been spewing.
And ffs, people still write things down. Cursive is a faster way to write than print. The whole reason people keep coming back to eInk and other free-hand computer tools stems from the fact that a pen remains mightier than a keyboard in a host of cases.
These are all still important educational touchstones, even if you're not going back to them every minute of every day.
except for the part were you go to computer science and are forced to study literature that is gonna be worth 1/3 of your final grade
Maybe you don't enjoy the process of learning or they're taught poorly, but it is fun later when you recognize all the references to that literature.
God forbid you learn basic skills and knowledge
Why does every bit of knowledge have to be monetized?
Aren't you ever curious about things and want to learn them?
Imagine being an adult now and not being able to do basic math. Wouldn't that be embarrassing?
Memorizing multiplication tables seems weird to me to be on that list. I might not use it every single day, but it comes up often enough that I can't understand how someone could consider it not a useful thing to know.
There has always been extraneous data in the education system. Holdover from the early years that spawned all the currently studied philosophers maybe. Back then all anyone really needed was the four Rs of reading, ritin, and rithmatick.