Why Do I Need This Stupid Class?

Helping Our Kids Build the Six Skills They’ll Need Most in Life

It’s back-to-school time, with all the usual rituals for students: buying supplies, getting a handle on a new bunch of teachers, and figuring out who to have lunch with.

For us parents, our rituals include answering the inevitable question: “Why do I have to take this stupid (fill-in-the-blank: calculus, art history, whatever) class? I’ll never use it in real life!”

They’ve got a point. If we’re being honest, many of their classes aren’t “useful” in the strict sense. How much do you remember from your global history class in high school or that random philosophy class from college? However, admitting to our kids that these classes did nothing for us isn’t helpful—or even true.

Our kids work hard at school and their question deserves a serious answer—especially for those in high school and college when all this stuff is getting real. What follows is what I’m telling my teenage daughter as she starts her sophomore year of high school…

Dear daughter,

I know you’re feeling a bit of re-entry burn from the freedom of summer to an intense new school year. You’re excited about some of your classes, but wondering why you need to take others. It’s a fair question that deserves a straight answer.

Since the beginning of time—when I was a kid—school has been organized around topic areas of content, such as math, history, literature, etc. And yet a successful work life is built mainly around skills. While what you know is important, what you can do is far more critical in the long run. This is especially true in the Internet age, where you can look up any information that you don’t know—and even get essays written about them by ChatGPT.?

In just a few years, what you’re able to do as a professional will be largely defined by Six Metacognitive Skills that you are building today. These skills are “meta” in that they are at the highest order, so that any other skill you can think of should fit under one of these.

The main purpose of your education is not to learn a bunch of content, but rather to build a powerful Engine for future success. The Six Metacognitive Skills that define your “Engine” are:

• RESEARCH = The ability to ask smart questions, find relevant information, and organize it in a way that you can then process. ?
• ANALYSIS = The ability to break down information (both quantitative and qualitative) into component parts in a way that enables insights about correlation and causality between key issues and variables.
• SYNTHESIS = The ability to “connect the dots”—using systems thinking to identify patterns and categories within a pile of content, even across different topics and disciplines.
• CREATIVITY = The ability to combine observations and ideas into novel insights that others find provocative and engaging.
• COMMUNICATION = The ability to share your observations and insights effectively with others in writing, speaking, and visual images. ?
• EMPATHY = The ability to listen to and appreciate other peoples’ perspectives and emotions, so that you can collaborate effectively in group settings.

While these six skills matter most in the long run, you cannot build your Meta-cognitive Engine without pouring in a large amount of content—ideally in group settings. There is no shortcut to building your Engine without loading up on this “fuel.”

This is the reason why “useless” classes and topics that you may never apply in real life—like calculus, poetry, bass guitar, Asian history—are still very helpful in the long run: because they help you build your Engine. In fact, the broader the range of topics you cover, the more powerful your Engine gets—just like eating a wide variety of healthy foods gives you more nutrients and a stronger body, or like cross-training in several sports will help you perform in your main one of focus.

That’s the bad news: lots of useless classes are not only required to graduate but also necessary to build a strong Engine. But here’s the good news: Once you have a powerful Engine, it can take you (almost) anywhere.

Within limits, it almost doesn’t matter much which topics you know about now because you can always learn a bunch of content in a new topic area whenever you want. The real value comes in turning your Engine against this content to create and communicate novel insights.

If you already know how to do generate insights on topics A, B, and C, you should also be able to apply this ability to topics F, J, and X as well. The only limit is how long it takes you to get up to speed on a new topic—which mainly depends on how specialized and technical the topic is.

Some classes in school will always be more interesting and relevant to you than others. It’s a smart strategy to pour more of your heart and soul into the topics that light you up and then do “good enough” in the other areas. Just keep in mind that even the “useless” topics really are useful in the end—in that they keep building some part of your Engine that will serve you later.

It's a true cliché that your world is changing way faster than mine was at your age. Given this reality, you can never know what skills and knowledge will be useful in the future. Your best bet is to build the strongest possible Engine—one that can evolve over time to deal with a wide range of future questions and situations we can’t even imagine today.

Many sources on the Internet attribute this remark to Charles Darwin in Origin of Species: “It is not the most intellectual of the species that survives; it is not the strongest that survives; but the species that survives is the one that is able best to adapt and adjust to the changing environment in which it finds itself.”

It’s a great quote that’s consistent with Darwin’s thinking. Sadly, he never wrote it. That’s a friendly reminder that the Internet is full of compelling disinformation, and an important part of the meta-skill of research is double-checking your sources!

Part of our job as parents is to support you in building the strongest, most adaptable Engine possible for your brilliant future. With that in mind, we hope you can have a bit more patience with your “useless” classes this school year.

Love, Dad