this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2025
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All of these things were useful to be taught. Just because you never needed to dissect a frog again in your life doesn't mean you shouldn't have an understanding of biology that these types of exercises provide.
'useful,' I doubt it for most people. Informative, like watching how to build a turbine engine, which you would probably never do in your lifetime unless you were an Aerospace engineer.
People thinking knowledge outside their career is useless is how we ended up with flat earthers, climate change deniers, anti vaxxers, anti maskers, and 5G conspiracy theorists. Most of those people are not objectively stupid, but they work in industries not closely related to science and instead of trying to learn how science actually works, they just blindly go with their assumptions and post their own opinions online thinking they're just as much an authority on it as the actual experts. And then more people ignorant of science end up thinking their intuition makes more sense than the published knowledge so they start denying science too.
So i agree that learning things like this is important but feel the need to point out the reason we have flat earthers and other nonsense is because the capitalist ruling classes benefit from an uneducated populace and purposefully push nonsense conspiracies in the media to divide and confuse the working class. Yes education can help with these things, but plenty of highly educated people believe in this stuff too.
IMO all people should receive a broad general education. It's good for the individual and for society. Even a poet should have at least a basic understanding of how an engine works and have some exposure to mathematics or whatever.
On the other hand, writers/artists trying to incorporate science and technology into their art while not actually understanding how the science/technology works are hilarious to the people that do.
(And I say this both as someone who somewhat knows technology and as an amateur sci-fi writer who definitely gets a ton of stuff wrong.)
Nowhere in the meme did it suggest removing it from the education system. It still doesn't mean it is useful for most people, outside of niche fields. The two things can both be true.
I'll disagree. It is useful. You benefit from going through learning this stuff regardless.
You forget most of what you learn if your memory muscle is not flexed regularly, especially on complex math equations and the like, so I would say it is useless for those that fall into this category.
You’ll forget “exactly” how you did it. Sure.
But you’ll remember that you solved something “similar” before and know that you can trace back or use some keywords in google/bing/ddg/etc to find a blog or something that goes over it in detail. Helping you solve the issue.
If you never learn it in the first place. You’ll never know it’s there.