Should schools primarily teach
practical, useful skills for the real world, or is there value in cultivating
knowledge that some might consider as useless? Recently, I had a
thought-provoking discussion with my students on this very topic, and I shared
a compelling quote by philosopher Agnes Heller with them: "If someone were to ask me, as a philosopher, what one should
learn in high school, I would answer: first of all, only useless things -
ancient Greek, Latin, pure mathematics, and philosophy. Everything that is
useless in life. The beauty is that
in this way, at the age of 18, you have a baggage of useless knowledge with
which you can do anything. While with useful knowledge, you can only do small
things." In this blog post, I’d like to point out the key moments of our debate about useless versus useful knowledge, exploring the merits of both sides
while ultimately standing alongside Agnes Heller's perspective.