Why Should I Study This, Anyway?

Never once during a football game so athletes stop chasing the ball, lie down on their backs, and compete to bench press the most weight. And yet all those football players spend hour after hour in the weight room.

You probably aren't going to marry that woman you're dating right now, so what's the point in trying to learn how to talk to her or how to work out the finer points of your relationship. Why bother to learn what you do or don't require in a relationship if this one is just going to end? Just wait until you meet the woman you're actually going to marry.

When I was younger, I knew with absolute certainty that I would work in a darkroom when I grew up. So I ignored every aspect of education that didn't deal directly with working with film and photographic paper and processing with chemicals, because what else could I possibly need to know. How could that end badly?

If you are going to be a concert flautist, you should avoid any musical training not related to playing a flute. Why learn to read piano music, or anything on bass clef? Why listen to any music ever except music played by flautists?

Looking back on the previous NFL season, we can see that any games not involving the Seahawks or the Broncos were a waste of time, because only those two teams played for the championship. We should have saved money and time and not played any of the other games.

Paintings by guys like Van Gogh and Monet and Da Vinci are dumb because the canvas is too thin and fragile to keep the cold out of a house, and too small to make any kind of useful structure. You can't build a house out of them, so what good are they?


These are all my replies to the multiple variations on that same stupid meme-- the one that says something like "School is dumb because it taught me that stupid Pythagorean theorum and I ain't never used it. So dumb, school."

You know what's dumb? Judging educational content strictly on utilitarian values.

You know what's dumb? Thinking that you can use a rear-view mirror to steer a forward-traveling path.

You know what's dumb? Thinking that preparation for the future involves practicing the exact literal tasks you will do and not developing skills and muscles that will help with multiple tasks.

You know who I've never met? The person who says, "Yes, my life would have been so great, if only I had known less. But having too much education just ruined everything."