We don't need no education!

Those of you who are young enough will remember the 1979 song by Pink Floyd entitled Another Brick In The Wall.

I'll show you the video later on.

In this song there's the memorable line "we don't need no education ..."

The song was playing on TV the other day and it set me thinking of all those hours spent at school learning things that had no effect whatsoever on my life thereafter.

Logarithms for instance. Those clever ones amongst you will know what logarithms are. What I remember is that we had books with every page filled with columns of numbers. Somehow we had to find the right page, count the columns at the top and stop at a given one, read downwards up to a point, and where the vertical column downwards met the horizontal list of numbers that was a logarithms. Or was it an anti-logarithm? Or a sine or cosine? I never understood it and it sent my brain off at a tangent ... or was it a co-tangent? The fact that I can't remember proves that it never helped me in life afterwards. I still burn the food when it is my turn to cook!

Which reminds me of a joke about Creation. In the beginning God told all creation to go forth and multiply. The snails were slow and came fifth. God was not happy with them.

A year later He came back to check, and sure enough, every one had had a good time and there were plenty of baby everything everywhere. Baby people, baby animals, baby fish, baby birds, baby snails and so on. And God was pleased.

However, He noticed that there were only two snakes. So He asked them, "Did you not have a good time? Why did you not multiply as I said?"

They replied, "We are adders. We need logs to multiply!"

Get it ... ??? No??? You need to learn about logarithms.

Another useless thing I learnt at school was the cumulative frequency of polygons. Can't remember what that was. Probably some disease which killed a lot of parrots. Hence Poly Gone!

Get it ... ???

Also, in chemistry ... I can't remember using anything I've learnt. But what I do remember is an experiment to discover the latent heat of fusion ... whatever that means.

Basically, I had a test tube melting some substance or other over a flame, (see my drawing above). When the substance has melted you turn the heat off. Then every minute or so you put a thermometer in the tube and measure and record the temperature. Obviously, as it cools the temperature lowers, (BIG DEAL).

What I did is leave the thermometer in the tube. As the substance cooled down it solidified again and the thermometer got stuck. So I re-heated the tube to get the thermometer out. It exploded and I had liquid mercury and liquid substance all over the desk.

I remember that the teacher had no sense of humour. And now, years later, I still burn the cooking.

When a friend told his dad that he was going to University to learn philosophy, his father replied, "That's good. Because I hear they are opening a great philosophy factory down the road!"

Youngsters are going to Universities and incurring great debts in paying fees and then gain a Degree which is no use to the country's economy, or will not get them a good job afterwards. For example Degrees in ancient languages, ancient history, literature, sociology, media studies, fashion and the arts. Granted, they are worthy subjects to study, but is there really a shortage of these skills in the world? For every person who succeeds in a career in these subjects there are probably 1000 who fail. So is it fair to encourage such education as opposed to say, medicine, nursing, and such skills that would benefit the world?

So I ask myself, as I remember the Pink Floyd song, why do we teach people so many complicated things that they will never use in later life?

Why not teach them to be entrepreneurs? How to start a business. How to make money. How to care for other people. How to nurture good values in life. How to be good citizens. And so many other positive how to that they can contribute to a better life and a better world.

Maybe I'm stupid, and I still have a lot to learn.