the only thing worse than being uninformed is lacking any type of intellectual curiosity and condemning those who do possess that trait or institutions who offer to satiate it. i understand the education system in many countries is incredibly flawed, however the benefits of the subjects taught go undervalued. they should be a baseline imo—and at a certain point u really have to stop blaming outside forces and circumstance for your own inherent lack of curiosity and motivation. the amount of people i know who say “they never taught us this in school !!!” — but yes they did, you just never showed up or bothered to think critically and care about what you’re learning

i watched a video of a tiktok creator shitting on schools having math be a requirement of the syllabus they teach because ‘who ever uses the pythagoras theorem?’. not only is mathematics an integral part of multiple jobs (not sure that the people making such criticisms would ever get a career in a field advanced enough to use them), it is also objectively beneficial for developing an understanding about the world around you. i genuinely love mathematics bc its inherently such a beautiful system that you can use to apply order and meaning and enhance your brain in tremendous ways

i think the point of learning about the pythagorean theorem is not just because it by itself is useful, it is because it is a stepping stone to realising there is inherent, but hidden, structure within the universe. i get that students don’t really appreciate this because they are stressed and tired and have usually bad teachers which diminish natural curiosity for the world; but the point of this knowledge is that it lets you understand the basis behind deeper, more useful facts (like euclidian distances and cross products or whatever). even the theorem itself has useful ideas inside of it, like triangle distance inequalities making up the definition of what a valid metric distance is, all of which are applicable in the real world

the creator said we “missed the point” but this is how it is for literally everything—tiny, seemingly unimportant facts make up the magic of the gestalt. it is valid to say that you don’t care about understanding the abstract foundations that make up everything in both our society and universe but thats like... a you thing why make it an indictment of education in of itself?

on a seperate note, a lot of people say that school should teach real shit like taxes and managing money but aside from the business/finance courses im reasonably confident there wouldn’t be much to teach about it. like, what are you gonna say? keep a budget/do stem and use turbotax? lol