we don't need no education

Have/do/will you ever think "why do we even have to learn that? It's not like we are going to use that piece of information later in life?"

I can tell you a good 30% of my schooling life was devoted to contemplating and lamenting this concept. And within good reason.

An 'anecdote' (there you go, another random word for personal story i picked up from high school) that aptly sums up this situation occurred when I was still to inexperienced in secondary education to actually feel the full impact of the uselessness of some lessons. Our pleasant, (haha), music teacher was lecturing us on the vitality of understanding treble or bass or something. To this, my friend and maybe the funniest person in the south eastern metropolitan area replied, "why, WHY do we have to learn about this shit? It's not like I'm ever going to use this again. It's not like some dickhead with a gun is going to come up to me and hold me at gun point and be like 'oh I'm going to kill you unless you can tell me what this symbol means.' Is it? It's not going to save my life."

Bless her.

I find the period where students are subject to the most vacuous and irrelevant information is during years 9 ad 10. Where nobody, except your adorably naive parents care about the state of your information and really how you spend your 6 hours at school is, at this stage relatively unimportant.

Like who is ever going to need to know about the vikings, or how to make a freaking proabala They should be teaching us valuable things, like playground/street lingo so you don't ever find yourself in a situation where someone slips you a pill when you thought you were getting a cookie after being offered a bikkie. Now thankfully I have never found myself in that situation, but thats no thanks to the Victorian education system, I'll tell you that much.

Or stuff like, how to upload/sync your ipod/iphone/ipad. Because it is inevitable that you will end up doing something like that for you or your parents or grandparents at some stage. And how to present shop, and dress for appropriate occasions.

Or how to suppress your cravings for baked goods.

I would've benefited plenty from that lesson.

But you know what. Lets be fair. Because my life lessons have taught me diplomacy and to observe situations from an objective standpoint, let us consider the beneficial lessons of formal education. One such example is learning the art of bullshitting your way around a question, and answering vaguely and indirectly yet getting the result you want. Another lesson I fully and gratefully attribute to my schooling is my ability to be able to untangle electrical cords and find the sources of them. Without those worksheets that ask you to follow the lines that are scrambled with your pencils I may not be the technologically comfortable person I am today.

Sex ed. Thats a given. Thank you for sex ed, for teaching us about STD's and babies and bodies and things you would die before asking your parents.

And actually, now that I think about it, all that random information I have retained from school is actually pretty good to bring up in conversations when you want to sound cultured and educated and refined.

Without which, I may find myself betraying a grievous amount of my inner bogan/immature baby.

Quelle catostrophe!