DESPITE having left school many, many years ago, there are still some absolutely useless pieces of learning clogging up your brain…
Oxbow lakes
It beggars belief that so much time was spent teaching you that some lakes are shaped slightly like beans. Or, more correctly, an obsolete harness for a castrated bull. We invented the tractor ages ago, you know. Your Year 9 teacher was full of shit.
Shakespeare quotes
You had to rote learn them for exams, but let’s see how useful knowing ‘Sweet are the uses of adversity, which, like the toad, ugly and venomous, wears yet a precious jewel in his head’ is when you’ve got to change the tyre on a Vauxhall Astra on a busy A-road.
Pythagoras’ theorem
If school’s to believed, triangles are going to play an incredibly important role in your adult life. Well, unless you’re a mathematician or a pyramid architect this is horseshit. But you’ll still have nonsense about hypotenuses popping into your head while you’re trying to remember your PIN in Tesco.
Planets in the solar system
Knowing the order of the planets in the solar system might be helpful if you ever appear on a quiz show. But failing that, it is utterly irrelevant to your daily life to know that Uranus is further from the sun than Saturn. ‘Uranus’ isn’t even sidesplittingly hilarious once you’re older than 35.
The periodic table
There are the names of some 100 metals and gases rattling around your head. Having the word ‘cadmium’ pointlessly burned into your brain, without even really knowing what it is, is the reason you can never remember your niece’s name.
How to throw a javelin
Not being a hunter-gatherer or an Olympian, teaching children to ‘correctly’ hurl spears across a field was a waste of time. There’s a slim chance Brexit food shortages might make hunting with a spear relevant again, but you were rubbish at it anyway.
Hieroglyphics
For some bizarre reason, when you were so young you could barely write in your actual first language, you were made to spend several weeks learning how to copy a select few hieroglyphs. Now, even if you discovered time travel, you’d be busy getting rich from it, not visiting Ancient Egypt and contracting plagues.
