Thursday 21 February 2008

10 School Subjects That Are Pretty Much Total Bullshit

10: Art

Paintings and sculptures are things that, when done right, really can make a lasting impact on society. Having said that, Art lessons are a complete waste of time for anyone who isn’t already good at art. Art lessons are simply a series of humiliations in which the geeky kid who likes manga gets to show off how good he is at drawing dragons made of magma while all the other people struggle to draw buildings in proper perspective. No matter what the teacher does, there is no way you can simply become better at art from revising thoroughly, thus making the subject a harsh lesson in reality – some people are just born good. No way you can compete with that.


9: French

History escapes the list because it applies to everywhere. French can’t even do that. Aside of a few parts of Canada and Africa, the only place you’d ever need to use French is in France, a land famous for cheese, wine, and disdain. No matter how good you get at speaking the language, the French will never forgive you for one mistake you might make, even though they can’t pronounce “the” properly in English, let alone the other words. No, learning French is bollocks, pure and simple. You’ll never need it.


8: PE

AKA: Revenge-time for all the fat kids who don’t understand maths. Rugby becomes a game where the athletic types play and everyone else stands around hoping the ball won’t be thrown at them; hockey is similar but with the added incentive of wooden (or metal!) club pain; if the teacher wants to stay indoors and read the paper, he’ll send everyone off on a cross-country run from the warmth of the staffroom. And for what benefit? All it does it keep children in shape, something they’ll never have to be in the Real World, when they hold down an office job and sit on their computer all day restructuring spreadsheets.


7: ICT

Nobody uses every part of Microsoft Office. Word I can understand, for writing essays/entries for critically acclaimed blogs, but Excel? Outlook? Who needs such things? I’ll tell you who: boring people. And why do children need to be taught how to use these things, anyway – the only places that require you to use complicated applications generally give you a course in how to do so before they take you on. For most children, ICT lessons are generally spent surfing the internet when the teacher is on the other side of the room.

6: DT

Design and Technology is an extended chance for children to injure themselves in a series of new and exciting ways. However, before they get to the fun part they have to spend months filling out cripplingly dull pieces of paper about ergonomics and profit margins. If anything, having DT lessons actually lessens the number of people who take up DT as a career. There would be far more designers if the subject was dropped, thus making DT totally bullshit.


5: Geography

Anything taught in a Geography lesson could also be learnt from reading about it in an Atlas. The capital of Portugal – in the Atlas. The population of China – in the Atlas. If you want to learn Geography – buy the friggin’ Atlas.


4: RS (or RE, whatever)

Leaving aside the whole part where a lot of the population of the World doesn’t actually believe in religion, RS spends most of the time reminding students of how other people are different. The Jews have crazy festivals like Passover where they eat strangely named stuff from a big bowl, and Muslims go spend all their time walking round a big black cube. Boy, those fellers sure are different! And the worst thing is, you don’t get to spend any time reading about the interesting religions. Jesus was hella dull, admit it. He just walked a lot and told stories. Dull, dull stories. Zeus – now there is a God! He’s all up shooting thunderbolts at people he didn’t like! Why Greek and Norse Gods aren’t taught in RS lessons is inexcusable to me, and so, for cultivating racial tensions, RS is BS.


3: Music

If someone has an ear for music, that’s a beautiful thing. However, in a room of 30-odd students, it’s more than likely that the talented will be overrun by those who can’t work a triangle (which includes me). Thus, in any given lesson about music, roughly 1/5 of the class will be wearing perpetual looks of weary depression, while the others mindlessly jab at note on a keyboard and repeatedly set off the demo function, snickering each time they do it.


2: Science (any)

Every important point made in a physics lesson is already obvious. The fact that things fall when you drop them, that if you push something it’ll move faster than if you left it alone, these are things that everyone already knows. Why do we need to be told why these things happen? The fact is, they do. And we would be happy to accept that, if only physics lessons didn’t repeatedly push reasons at us. Chemistry is a chance to play with acid and fire, and frankly that’s what the army was created for. Biology? Biology I kinda like. I still don’t get why we need to know why plants are green. Can’t we just accept these things and move on?


1: Maths

Thing is, maths is one of the most useful subjects there is… for about two years. Once we’ve been taught how to add, subtract, divide, and multiply, there are only a few more things Maths can teach which isn’t completely useless. Fractions and so on are helpful for some, but the relevance of equations in the real world is negligible. It seems pretty obvious that once children are taught the basics of maths, they should be allowed to only continue the subject if they have an eye on doing something financial as a job. To keep children trapped with trigonometry, probability, and – groan - surds seems like cruelty. Pointless, pointless cruelty. When was the last time you wrote a graph, anyway? Exactly.

3 comments:

  1. Actually I think the most useless subject is English Literature. Shakespeare bears no relevance to today's society whatosever, and frankly isn't even written in English as we know and understand it. And as for everything else- the "skills" you learn in English Literature are only useful in English Literature exams (making the whole excercise a futile waste of time) or to the 0.0001% of the population who work as book/film reviewers

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  2. And incidentally French is also spoken in Belgium. This fact easily shows that learning French is worthwhile after all.

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  3. Another pointless one is (or, at least, was) Typing For Boys, which I did. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your point of view) no other boy wanted to do typing, so I was stuck in a class with fifteen other hormonal teenage girls.

    I did very well, and got distinctions and merits for my finger dexterity, and can still type very fast today - but it's a bloody useless qualification as a publican.

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