"When Will I Ever Use This?"

I know it’s happened to most parents at least once. Your child is so frustrated with schoolwork that they demand to know when they will use the knowledge in the “real world.”

What do you say? What can you say?

As a tutor, I have gotten this question from students of nearly every grade level, including those preparing for standardized tests. When I first started tutoring, I’m not sure I had a good answer. I might or might not have told students, “You might not use this specific task or idea in your day-to-day life after school, but you might.” This is, of course, a terrible answer, and students can see right through it. It’s like when you were in school, and your teacher told you that you had to know how to work problems out on paper because “you won’t always have a calculator with you” when you’re grown. I always wondered if they imagined we would always have scratch paper, pencils, and adequate time to figure out all the math problems we would no doubt encounter every day as adults. The teacher knew it was a terrible answer even if they could have foreseen that we all now have calculators in our pockets. They just didn’t know what else to say.

So here we go. Here are just a few things you can explain to your dear scholar to help justify all the math (and work in other subjects) they have to know and do when you just can’t say “because I said so” one more time, or you’re going to just lose it.

School teaches you how to keep learning, a process you should never stop.

Quick Takeaway: “Life is all about learning things. You should never stop learning; school is where you learn how to learn.”

Your child is right about something: it’s unimaginable that when we are adults, our boss will one day come to us and say, “The company will have to close up shop unless you can work these four quadratic equations in the next thirty minutes!” It’s silly to try to get your kids to believe they will need to know how to calculate the slope of a line every day of their lives after high school. No, they won’t necessarily need to know these specific tasks later on, just like you might not need to know them right now to be a functioning adult.

You might also hear other adults (or you might) say, “Why didn’t they teach me in school how to [insert adult task here]?” Some schools don’t teach how to cook food properly and deliciously, how to fill out a tax form or create an effective résumé, or how to change a tire, but those are tasks that most of us have had to do at some point in adulthood. Or at least it would have been nice to know how to do them to avoid paying someone else, right? Why didn’t they teach us this in school?

It’s not about what specific tasks they did or didn’t teach us, though, is it? School’s purpose is not to teach you everything you will ever need to know and nothing more. School, especially kindergarten through twelfth grade, is where you are supposed to learn how to learn. You’re tasked with putting blocks of different shapes in the appropriate holes so you can recognize other similarities later, like when there are different variable terms in an expression (4x + 2y), you know that you can’t just add them together because they are not “like terms.” Later in life, you learn that the TPS reports go in the TPS file, not the SPT file. They are different. Sure, it’s common sense to you now. That’s because you learned it previously, or at least you learned how to figure it out. You learn “righty-tighty, lefty-loosey” because the world is full of things that screw in and unscrew.

You’re tasked with writing a book report in fifth grade because it’s important to understand and to be able to tell others something you learned from the written word. In high school, you’re tasked with writing research papers because it’s important to know about having reliable sources before stating something as fact. Your elementary and middle school teachers corrected your spelling, grammar, and punctuation because it’s important to communicate clearly and concisely, and that takes years of practice.

Our teachers taught us that there are important distinctions between things that are similar and dissimilar. They taught us it’s important to follow directions. They taught it’s important to be able to read and write well. We can now figure out how to read a recipe and make a great meal. We can follow directions like “subtract line 48 from line 46, and write the difference on line 49” to get our Form 1040 filled out properly. We can read a job description and craft our resumes and job applications to be effective and communicate our skills and experience.

You are getting ready for what comes next.

Quick Takeaway: “Not everything in school is to prepare you for something that will happen decades from now. Most things are preparing you for the next lesson or next course.”

Some things you learn in school don’t directly relate to tasks you’ll do after you’re done with high school. As I mentioned, though, that’s not the purpose of school. At fourteen years old, learning how to factor a quadratic, you’re not preparing for real life; You’re preparing for the next coming lesson. You learned how to count when you were little because you had to know what number comes after another so you could learn how to add and subtract. You had to learn how to add and subtract to make it easier to learn how to multiply and divide. You had to learn how to multiply to make it easier to learn about exponents. If you’re a junior or senior, you might be preparing for standardized tests like the ACT and SAT. When you’re studying for those tests, you’re not preparing for “real life”; you’re preparing for that test. You are getting ready for what comes next in your journey.

Be ready for anything. 

Quick Takeaway: “The more knowledge you gain, the better prepared you will be to succeed. As the saying goes, ‘Knowledge is power.’”

A wise teacher once told me, “Knowledge is good in and of itself.” Knowledge for the sake of knowing things is a desirable and honorable trait. Willful ignorance is not only undesirable, but it also leaves one vulnerable to being swindled and cheated.

Think about it this way: Who do you admire most? Whether you know them personally or they are a celebrity you’ll never meet, think about some specific people you truly admire and would like to emulate. Are they ignorant or, even worse, stupid? Of course not, unless they’re jesters and you only admire them for their comedy. You admire people who are knowledgeable, smart, and intelligent. You admire people who have learned more than the bare minimum to survive in “the real world.” Knowing more about the world and how it works will open more doors than you might be able (or willing) to imagine right now.

Indeed, not every task in school will directly relate to a task in “real life,” but school is where you learn how to be self-sufficient and productive. Upon completing school, you should be able to learn things you need to know. You should be able to work with the information you have to get the information you need. You should be able to follow the directions on tax forms and job applications. School is where you learn how to discern between credible and dubious sources. Go forth and be productive. Always be observing, learning, and questioning. Think critically. Never stop putting the blocks in the appropriate openings.