The Fallacy of Useless Knowledge

I have written before (here and here) about the importance of application in teaching and learning. In fact, I consider knowledge that has not been applied useless. That is to say that knowing the facts and rules about something but not knowing how to use it in your life has little use for you beyond passing certain types of knowledge/memory-based tests.

Therefore, I assert rather firmly that all learning must be applied and, as follows, that teachers must always include application in their lesson plans for every new item of learning. Yes, EVERY new item. As a bear minimum, every lesson you plan should include something new for the students to learn and opportunities for them to apply that new thing to life so that they are capable of actually using it outside of the classroom. Anything less than this is, in the most literal sense of the word, useless.

Many teachers seem to find this assertion particularly confronting. First of all, many of those teachers that are still beholden to a very theory-based, lecture-driven approach to teaching and learning find it offensive to be told that many of their lessons are useless; and I appreciate that in that context, it might be a fairly provocative thing to say, but it is truly what I believe. On the other hand, there are teachers who already see the value and importance of a more student-centred, skills-based approach, but simply disagree that ALL things must be applied.

Why Teach Useless Knowledge?

These teachers—the latter sample—suggest that some things cannot be applied. So my question then is, why are you teaching it? Indeed, I ask again here, if something has no application to an individual’s life, why should we teach it? Why give our students useless information? 

However, the truth is, I don’t believe such a thing as useless knowledge actually exists. As I have mentioned above, I believe that ALL knowledge has some application, so if you haven’t yet found an application for something, then you haven’t looked hard enough. The most common responses I get to this are listed below, and indeed these points did challenge me at first:

1. The life experience of younger learners is very limited and there is little opportunity for applying the knowledge they learn, but it is important that they learn it to prepare them for higher grades and later learning.
2. Some things we learn only to build upon with a more advanced topic; perhaps the more advanced, composite topic has application, but the component topics do not.
3. Some things have application for specific jobs and vocations, but only very few students will go on to do those specific things in later life.

Again, each of these points has some substance, and each one had me stumped when I first heard it. Therefore, I have spent a good amount of time this last year exploring these ideas through various workshops and programmes as well as my own ruminations.

1. Application for Younger Learners

It is true that young learners have a very limited experience of life and a very limited range of scenarios through which to apply the knowledge they encounter at school. It is equally true that to limit what we teach to the experience that they have would be a terrible approach and that they do indeed need to learn a lot as young learners to prepare them for later learning.

There are two ways that I have come to see solutions to this problem. First of all, it is surprisingly easy to find applications for knowledge at this stage if you merely take the extra time to think about it. Secondly, it helps to think of application slightly differently both at this stage and also in response to some of the other points that I will discuss later.

First, we start by simply asking the question, “how could this help my students?” or, “what could my students use this for?”. Asking these questions is an important first step and one that many teachers actually overlook. By simply asking the question, often we can find an answer much more quickly that we might at first expect.

Secondly, we can differentiate between basic Application and Real Life Application. That is to say that some things are applied almost naturally because they intrinsically entail doing something in order for the knowledge to have any meaning at all. As a crude example, some basic vocabulary could be said to be this way. For example, if you know what the word tree means, then you know what a tree is; you can identify a tree in the real world and call it by its name, thus the knowledge is applied. There are different gradations of this concept, which we will see as we go along.

An example that came up recently was learning numbers. Learning numbers is an essential piece of knowledge, foundational to mathematics and also very important to language and communication. However, even the knowledge of numbers is useless unless it is applied—we just don’t often think of this because it seems like an odd concept in the first place.

But let’s just think about it for a moment. What does unapplied knowledge of numbers look like? Well, it is the knowledge that (in English, at least) this squiggle, “1”, is the number one and corresponds to the spoken/written word “one”. A student could learn numbers one to ten by being shown flashcards of the numerals (1, 2, 3…10) and drilling the words that go with them (“one”, “two”, “three”…“ten”) and would then “know numbers” but would not be able to do anything with them.

So we start by asking ourselves, what do we do with numbers? Well, we do mathematics and we count. Then let’s go first with counting. This is to correspond both the numeral (“1”) and the word (“one”) with the concept of one-ness, i.e. single objects. When a student knows that a single thing on its own can be referred to as “one thing” and that another single thing added to it makes “two things” and so on, they can count. This is using the knowledge to do something, it is a skill and it is useful.

One could stop there. Counting is already application in and of itself, so learning to count by showing flashcards of multiple objects and counting items around the classroom is already applying the knowledge. However, we could still question the real life value of that. One could still ask, why should I want to know this? Why is this something I would want to do? 

So can we take this one step further to Real Life Application? A teacher in a recent workshop I ran in Manado, Sulawesi suggested a very nice Real Life Application for precisely this. She said that perhaps we could have our students count the items in their pencil case and then at the end of the lesson, get them to make sure they hadn’t lost anything by counting them again. This is a simple exercise to do, but bestows so much more value upon the learning. Now the student puts a very real, personal value on the learning; counting helps the students keep track of their belongings.

This is the kind of thing that we want to achieve with every lesson, and it might take a little bit more time and more cognitive effort to find applications for every topic, but it we make that effort, I assure you we’ll find one. 

Another example that came up with YL teachers was colours. Again, by learning colours based on flashcards and objects, the language (knowledge) is already applied. A good way of giving this more real life value though is by having students identify the colours of their clothes and other belongings so that they can better describe them if something goes missing. You could even simulate this by discreetly hiding a student’s pencil case or notebook or similar, and then when they come to ask if you have seen it, you could ask them to tell you what colour it was before “finding” it and returning it to them. (Caveat: be sensitive with something like this, and choose your students wisely.)

2. Application of Component Knowledge

By component knowledge, I mean something that we must know, usually in conjunction with other component knowledge, in order to understand or know something else, a composite knowledge. This includes things like knowing the elements of the periodic table in order to know how certain substances are made up (a crude example, but rather apropos, I feel).

Some teachers have argued that some things that we teach (components) do not have application themselves, but they must be learned first so that something bigger (a composite) can be taught, which does then have an application. At first, we might consider the composite the application of the component. That works, in theory, and might be a satisfactory answer to some. However, the problem I have with this still lies in the response to the question, “why should I learn this?” 

The teacher might feel that it is a sufficient response to say, “you should learn this so that you can learn x, which will help you…”, but I assure you that the student will have already stopped listening by that point and will be no more interested in the topic. Therefore, I again assert the need for Real Life Application, even of such component knowledge. This is tough, but once again, the solution is nothing more than time and effort. If you can’t think of an application yourself, just try googling, “what do we use x for?” I think you’ll be surprised by what you find.

Alternatively, if you really cannot find a Real Life Application for something other than its contribution to particular composite knowledge, perhaps you could turn it upside down. Sometimes, it might be better to start with the composite knowledge, which has a clear Real Life Application, and then work down to the components that students need in order to achieve that target.

Again, language provides us with examples of this. We spend a lot of time on reading and listening activities with learners, whether in their first language or a foreign language, before we teach specific vocabulary and grammar. The reason for this is because it provides a picture of what students can do with the language, and also provides motivation in that they want to be able to do these things. 

An example of this that came up recently was raised by a maths teacher. He maintained for a long time that much of what he taught did not have application, it was all just about building on one topic to get to the next and so on. Not having a background in maths myself, many of the mathematic principles that came up are not easy for me to describe here, but needless to say that eventually, with collaboration from all of the teachers present that day, we found applications for every topic that he suggested.

One example was related to the teaching of pi. Pi had to be learned so that students could calculate things like the area of a circle. But what was the application for that, even? Well, again we have to begin with the question, how will this help my students? What are some situations where a person might have to calculate area, whether of a circle or indeed anything else? Many elementary teachers apply calculations of area by measuring the area of things around the classroom, but still I ask, to what end?

It might seem a little simplistic, but a suggestion from one of the teachers was, I thought, rather brilliant. He suggested that we might need this when we are doing home improvements, such as decorating. Wallpapering a wall requires that we know the area of the wall so that we buy the right amount of paper. When the wall is irregularly shaped, which is of course more often the case than not, we might need to make a number of calculations.

Just telling the students that they can use this knowledge to paper walls is likely not going to have much effect. This is another example where you might want to turn the process upside down. Instead of first teaching the calculations, which the students might not care about, and then explaining what they could be used for, try presenting the problem first, asking students how they would solve it, and then giving them the tools they need to do so. This way, you establish value first and teach second.

Thus, the teacher might take the students to a room in the school and say that the room is to be redecorated. The teacher might then ask the students how much paper is needed, or which furniture would best fit, or where certain artworks could be hung. The students might puzzle over this for a while, some might even know the answer already. The teacher can then demonstrate how to solve the problem by taking the necessary measurements and making the necessary calculations, and the students can learn and practise the technique themselves. In order to get there, it might be necessary to go through a few different calculations in turn, each of which would be uninteresting in its own right but carries more value for the students when they know what they will be able to do with it when they have finished.

This also relates to the third scenario raised.

3. Professional Application

There are some things that are immensely useful in real life but only perhaps for certain people, i.e. the people that go into a specific profession. We might say that the example given above loosely fits this description: its very useful for decorators or interior designers, but not every body needs the same set of skills. Or more precisely here in Indonesia, most people are only interested in the same handful of jobs and everything else is irrelevant.

However, it is only at school that many young people will ever be exposed to the options and opportunities available to them. Many young people are limited in their view of the wide range of careers available, largely because their parents express certain expectations or preferences and then because schools and teachers often conform to these same parameters. It is my opinion that teachers should introduce their students to as many different options as possible.

If a learning objective comes up that is only really relevant to a certain profession or lifestyle, etc., then consider it a chance to not only teach the learning objective but also to give students insight into options available to them later in life. And again, we don’t do this just by telling our students about these options. We must introduce them in a way that is both interesting and relatable. 

Consider showing videos of “a day in the life of a…” or giving reading materials or even research projects for students to find out more about certain careers. You could even visit workplaces and studios, etc. or invite professional individuals to speak at the school. Each of these activities can be achieving two goals at once, giving insight into the career while also teaching the knowledge and skills relevant to it.

Of course, the fact remains that in concrete terms, after graduation students make choices and not everybody will use every thing that they learned at school. But our job as teachers is to give them as much opportunity as possible so that when the time to make the choice comes, they are as free as possible(i.e. as prepared, capable and skilled as possible) to make whatever choice they want. 

Many students go into the same careers as their parents or as the rest of their friends simply because they do not know what else is available. Many more go into these careers simply because they cannot do anything else; they don’t have the skills needed. As teachers, it is often up to us to broaden our students’ horizons in a way that nobody else will, and it is certainly our responsibility to give our students all the skills they are going to need in order to explore these horizons after they leave us.

School should be one hundred percent dedicated to preparing students for their lives outside of and after school. This means teaching them things that they can use to make their lives easier, more productive and more enjoyable as well as showing them all of the different things a person can do when they leave school, not just pigeonholing all students with a narrow range of skillsets to suit a limited selection of careers.

Therefore, if you are not making sure that everything you teach your students has a real world application, you are failing them. And if you are not providing a wide range of different life experiences and varied applications, then you are robbing them of opportunity. 

Remember

• Unapplied knowledge is useless knowledge.
• However, I do not believe there is such a thing as useless knowledge.
• Therefore, it is our responsibility as teachers to seek application for all the knowledge we teach.
• Do this by asking yourself these simple questions:
• What can my students do with this knowledge?
• How will this knowledge help my students?
• How do people use this knowledge in their daily lives?
• What professions is this knowledge relevant to?
• It is our responsibility as teachers to prepare our students for life outside of and after school.
• This includes giving them all of the skills that they will need to succeed, not just endless memorised knowledge of facts and figures.
• This also means introducing them to a wide variety of options and opportunities to think about regarding their careers and lifestyles, even if it challenges the status quo or the limitations of the local norms.