I can remember being forced to memorize/learn a lot of trivial things in school: State capitals, sentence structure (the direct object, pronoun, blah blah blah), tide cycles, etc. Looking back, I've never used any of this information since, and have long since forgotten whatever I supposedly learned. In fact, I feel the only useful things I got out of school can be summed up with reading, writing, critical thinking, and basic math (addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division). Besides these things, I can't tell you a single thing I learned in school - nothing but rote memorization, and forgetting it over the summer/once the semester ended. Though I can, somewhat, agree with the argument that rote memorization helps brains develop and grow or whatever, overall, I feel like my entire education was fairly useless, and there's nothing I'm passionate enough about to get a degree in.

In private school we use to have to memorize Bible verses. We would read a section of the Bible every morning and would have a test on it every Friday. I have a good memory so I always did well on them. We also had to learn the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence, the Preamble and others I'm sure. Our class one year also memorized the prepositional phrases which I can still name to this day.

Its stuff that makes the adults fell all warm and fuzzy about, but like you said stuff you never use in real life. The problem with making kids memorize stuff like this is that they usually don't even understand what they have memorized. Reminds me of the songs we use to sing for the Christmas plays. I knew the songs, but didn't understand the meaning on them.

Geometry. =P

Algebra. What do square roots have to do with life? I can cook eggs just fine.

If you wear plain colored t-shirts, you're always part of a gang.

Freedom is the antithesis of education.

Pretty much all I learned.

art appreciation

Everything other than math and reading. And even then with math, all you need to know is add, subtract, multiply, and divide. If you ever want to know anything else, and you know how to read, you can just look it up.

VHSer has it pegged...Reading, adding, dividing, subtracting and multiplying (you forgot to mention writing, though). Everything else is bullshit. I push carts for a living...When and why will I need to remember who won The French And Indian War?

Pretty much everything but basic math that has been listed (even then you can use a calculator or something else that will do it for you.), and how to read and write. I suppose you could list Health but obviously barely anyone pays attention in that class.

I've never had to name any presidents that weren't recent, any dates of wars, do a long winded math equation, disect a frog or squid, etc.


It's a good thing i'm already an American citazen because I don't know that alot of us would pass the extensive test with all the stuff you have to know to become one.

I remember someone's older sibling who was a hair dresser walking into our Algebra 2 class to ask her younger sister a question. The teacher took that opportunity to ask her how she uses math in her daily life. She said "eh, you don't really use this stuff. If I have to i'd just dig out a ruler, inches, that's all I really need to know." The teacher gave her an if looks could kill look.

Chemistry, when will I ever need to know how to balance chemical equations. Religon classes were all the same: If you do this you're going to Hell.

I think they should just teach the basics of math, add, subrtact, multiply and divide and maybe get a little into fractions and decimals. Everything beyond that should be put in an optional class.

Geography the way they taught it at my highschool was pointless. A one day class on how to read maps would have been enough. We spent so much time on stuff like types of rocks (pointless) and types of clouds. I still remember alot of the names of types of clouds but its useless stuff to know. I don't even hear weather forecasters refer to type of clouds. Why did they feel we needed to know this stuff?

I was so happy when I was able to sign myself out in high school and go to the mall or downtown when I was getting fed up with classes.

I haven't used anything more then mutiplication in real life so all HS math gets my vote.

And like the otehr poster said, memorizing things from the Bible in private schools. We also had to memorize things from Luther's Smallc atacism, adn they were retarted. You get somthign like "You shall not kill" and it would be fallowed up with this long as deffinition that you had to memorize to because you know, you shall not kill isn't self explanitory or anything :roll:

They must not teach state capitols or anything like that anymore becuase my step son doesn't have a clue to any other then north Carolina's. He also could't tell me what 3 countries make up north america. So for all you thinking history adn geography are useless think again. Know where places are and how things have gone down in the past is very useful. Granted it kind of depends on what your job is but still, as they say,, those that do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

I've met so many people that don't even know that Maine's a state :shock:
However, I guess these days if you don't know something you can easily look it up in like two seconds.
I hated geography class and map tests, trying to remember all these cities and mountain areas in countries I knew i'd never visit.

Baburu....where the FCK do you work, a box factory?? I use basic multiplication every day just sitting inside my house doing nothing...lol.

One louder...are you some kind of dumb sht?? That's GEOLOGY, wow I think you definitely could have spent some more time in Geography class because you didn't learn a thing. AHAHA rocks in geography...good god, a prime example of why our country is basically on the brink of failure. No offense or anything, it's probably not your fault at all.

Bassman-I totally hear you, I went to a Catholic school as well. What pisses me off is that they wasted so much time teaching us that crap when they could have spent it on real knowledge like science or history or American government. Or perhaps philosophy! How many people know how to logically debate something? They say private schools teach you more than public schools, but I think the fact that you have to learn religion (most of the time) really just contradicts any impact that information may have on your life.

Americans don't know crap about their government and I'm pretty certain that's why congress and giant corporations have so much power over our country now. I think that's the one thing they could have spent more time teaching us.

I always found anything past basic algebra to be pretty useless. I mean who gives a fck about Parabolas? And those dumb line graph things? Has anyone EVER used that to the complexity they teach it to you in high school? or college? What a waste. I kind of get the importance of using more of your left brain, but it's just a waste when I won't spend much time using it anyway in the field of film making.

Can you please calm the fuck down or something? Every other post I see of yours you're either bitching about something or insulting someone. It's starting to get on my fucking nerves.

Saruman-....why should I "calm the fck down" when you're the one who's getting all huffy every time you read my posts? I think you need to calm down, it's just a message board.

If it pisses you off that much, just don't read them. I'm just sharing my opinions, there's no harm in it at all.

I assure you Felix I'm not a dumbshit. We were taught about rock formations as filler in my CANADIAN (did you read my profile, chief?) grade 9 Geography class in order to get a term's worth of material in.

One Louder-I apologize for the comment if it came off as nasty.

That is absolutely ridiculous...geography really has nothing to do with rocks, even physical geography in a lot of cases. Climate, terrain, altitude, yes, rocks...most of the time have very little to do with how people are shaped.

That's not only useless information for life, it's useless for the subject you're learning.

No hard feelings, the teacher I had for the topic wasn't well liked. I didn't have much of a problem with the guy, he also taught my grade 9 English class and had us write a short paper on our interpretation on how Pink Floyd's Another Brick in the Wall Part II is depicted in the film version of The Wall so I figure he couldn't be all bad.

What's even more pointless and depressing about my time in public and highschool was how poorly they taught me French. I never ever got to really learn proper daily use conversational French. Year after year I just got taught how to conjugate verbs and the French words for stuff like school supplies and how to say things like 'close the door' in French. Except the last year I took French where we read from a book about Sasquatch. I found the Sasquatch book really childish, I had a look at the back cover one day and noticed it said it was written for the Quebecois equivilent of grades 3 and 4. Here I was in grade 10 French reading a public school book on Sasquatch. They should have been doing a lot more work towards getting us properly bilingual, I lived in Ottawa at the time and it would have opened up a lot more job opportunities, but I guess my highschool wasn't interested in that.

I feel the same way about Spanish, I actually went to Spain and after 3 years of Spanish classes couldn't talk to the natives there! By the end of the week I learned more from trying to communicate with the natives than I did the entire 3 years I spent in the classroom.

It's crazy. I think the problem comes from the fact that they don't teach us this stuff early enough. We really should be learning another language in elementary school. It's a proven fact that learning another language (or playing an instrument) has the ability to increase your intelligence level. Not only are they preventing us from properly learning a language, they are hindering our intellectual growth. Why? Does it have to do with school budgets?

I simply don't know why they don't start kids earlier on this stuff and make it mandatory.