Debunking the 'Pointless' Education Myth | StarTalk

People think that when they take math in school, there's the common response like, "I will never need to use this for the rest of my life," as they learn trig identities or the Pythagorean theorem or whatever it is that we all remember learning, feeling pretty sure it's never going to show up again.

But that misses something important. It misses the fact that the act of learning how to do the math establishes a new kind of brain wiring in your mind, a kind of problem-solving brain wiring. So it's not about what you learned; it's about what methods, tools, and tactics you had to develop in order to solve the problem that you may never see again for the rest of your life.

But you will see other problems where these methods and tools will become immensely valuable to you. It's no different from in the liberal arts, where if you're tasked with writing a term paper on some leader from some chapter in the history of the world, you might never need to know about that leader again for the rest of your life—unless you're in Jeopardy or something.

So what's the point? Well, the point is: what did you do to conduct the research? What did you do to compose the sentences, your choice of words to communicate an idea—a fresh idea on top of already known ideas? That is the value of education; not how much information they can pour in your head, but how equipped you are to explore the world on your own after you get out.