I cannot, in all honesty, recall learning any relevant information in the following subjects in middle/high school:
~History
huh, so that's what was up 5000 years... cool. That's important to my understanding of current society how?
~English
Oh, I was supposed to understand this weird thing called my "audience?" And for the past 11 years? No wonder I wasn't as persuasive to my teacher when I wrote to her as my peer. Good thing I got bad marks for not getting taught something fundamental.
~Literature
Bahahaha, I think this category speaks for itself. Oh yeah, Shakespeare is cool. Good thing I care not for the culture he lived in nor have I ever been to a play nor do I care for "the reason Shakespeare was so awesome." Homestar Runner quote. Awesome.
~Health
"Dear Adam,
Stop wanting to have sex with everyone you know.
You might get a long, embarrassing lecture about how your penis works and how AIDS is spread." *cough* immorality *cough* My only crime was "clearly wanting" to know about the horrors of puberty and "wanting to have sex with everyone I knew."
~Math
Laugh out loud, out loud. Past Precalculus, I stopped learning any relevant information. If I wanted to become a Fine Arts Major(lolol!), I could have probably quit math entirely back in 8th grade.
Well, there you go. That's all I learned in school. "School" is loosely defined as teaching people, to quote my parents, "how to teach themselves" whereas, in the real world where most of us live, the stuff I learn has only relevance in what I do in a career. Like, if I had ever received any classes on say rhetoric or something universally useful, I would appreciate public education better.
History is just now gaining applicability; I moved from the "unimportant and irrelevant 1800s" into the 1800s that spelled the Reconstruction and rebirth of a bleeding, disunited country. The history of our nation is something debated constantly, knowing it is like understanding why things are they way they are now. It also gives a perspective into the lives of our forefathers, which is just kind of cool in and of itself.
In English, I just began to understand how writing well-written essays will help you persuade a man three-thousand miles away to join your cause; how if you appeal to your reader's concerns and counterpoints, you both walk away from the essay with a smile on your face; one from being given enlightenment, one from giving enlightenment. The magical way writing has morphed through the ages. The analysis of essays of persuasive people is amazing. Good thing it took 'til my 11th year of English to have it become important.
While the other subjects are incredibly relevant because of timely issues, literature talks much of the culture of the past, but is mostly just a kind reminder that we've all been thinking about the same crap for over thousands of years. Cool.
Health is only important in the respect of giving reverence to the magnificent complexities of the human body and ultimately the Creator of it. In another respect, learning how to treat your body correctly is an amazing part of life. "I wouldn't say if you have your health, you have just about everything, but rather, without your health, you have just about nothing." As Professor Grim once said. But you know, understanding how penises work is pretty important too. RAAAAAAAAAAGE!
Math is alot like Science except even harder to see the relevance. Math is amazing though. Simply logic at its finest, Math holds foundational truths of the universe. Math gives us absolute truths, but after doing 30 problems a night for 140 days, you kind of lose the mysticism of the subject and it becomes a daily grind rather than the dreamy life of the philosophers who thought up this crap. Leonardo got paid to make inventions. I don't think it was a time line sort of job. Makes me want to learn more about history, and economics, and the history of economics.
Science, like biology, like microbiology, is so useless it hurts. Cool. Some viruses attack the hip bone, the hip bone's connected to the knee bone, etc. I totally will go invent the cure to some random crappy disease because the entire year of microbiology I learned. The cool thing to notice here is that the human body is amazingly complex. Yet somehow, after a certain point, it stops being fun to read massive amounts of text about it and you start "learning" through sheer "unpleasure." Or, as George Orwell would put it, doubleplus ungood, comrade. Am I in a Physics class because I want to be? Yes. Am I learning massive amounts of math involving Newton's massive brain? Yes. Is it because it's applicable? Yes. Do I plan to get a physics/engineering degree, in which case this math would become useful? No.
All in all, school became stopped being fun as soon as it became involuntary. College is amazing because the people there who have higher learning do very much so enjoy the subjects they teach, students are there because they want to be, and the mysticism of learning how the holy crap the universe works is back. Hip hip! Hooray!
