Why do we have to go to school?

Can’t I just focus on Basketball?

Hey, why should you have to study geometry? You’ll never need that stuff. I’ve heard kids say that their fathers sold insurance and never once used geometry. Or their fathers built cars and they never once were asked about ancient history. Smugly, all sorts of kids say and think they will never again need some random stuff they are supposed to learn in school so they feel justified in passing it off and not bothering to learn it.

If you are ever in that kind of thinking rut, I have news for you. You will hardly ever need any of the things you learn in school.

So no use studying history, or geography, or science, or algebra. No one will probably ever require that you know what Vasco da Gama did, where Sri Lanka is located, why water condenses on windows in the morning, or at what point two jets traveling in opposite directions will intercept each other. You never have to know any of the facts you learn in school.

Of course, you never have to do pushups in a game, but they are worthwhile preparation. In case you have not begun to understand, let the following definition sink in.

Education is a series of seemingly meaningless challenges aimed at preparing you for an unknown future. Once you accept that definition of education you will never again make a stupid comment about not needing this or that  subject. The point is simple. You need to learn how to learn, how to respond to boredom, how to overcome fatigue, how to persist when things aren’t fun. That’s education and it’s useful everywhere, for everything, for the rest of your life.

You may be right, you may not need geometry. But you do need practice learning new facts because whatever you do there will likely be new things to learn. In fact, in the world we live in, there are constantly new things to learn in just about every job. If you don’t know how to learn, if you haven’t practiced learning, how are you going to be able to learn what you actually do need to know when the time comes to learn that crucial stuff?

Can you imagine the following dialogue after a football coach asked his team to do neck bridges to strengthen neck muscles?

“Hey Coach, I’m not going to do this stuff.”

“Why not?”

“I’ll never need that. I’m a quarterback.”

“What? A quarterback?”

“Yeah,” the kid says. “I usually just hand the ball off and sometimes I drop back to throw passes.”

Of course, anyone who knows anything about  football sees this as ridiculous. A quarterback is going to be sacked from all angles; he’s going to be blindsided, read-ended, overturned and pancaked. If he wants his career to last more than a couple of downs he will want to prepare every muscle in his body for hits he has never imagined. It makes perfectly obvious sense in football, but somehow dumjox and others lose sight of this wisdom when it comes to education, where the “hits” are even less predictable than in football.

To prepare yourself for the unknowable future, you really have only one choice: learn to master the things thrown in front of you now. By learning French and physics and trigonometry, things you might not ever need again, you will exercise your brain muscle and prepare it for the future. And you’ll be glad you did.

—Excerpted from the book, Think Like a Champion

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