The Usefulness of Useless Learning

December 1, 2025

The question arrives, sooner or later, in every tutoring session I've ever conducted. A student, bright, curious in some domains, dutifully conscientious in others, looks up from a calculus problem or a passage of medieval history and asks, with what sounds like genuine bewilderment but is really something closer to rebellion: "When am I ever going to use this?"

It's a reasonable question, perhaps even an inevitable one. We live in an age that valorizes the practical, the applicable, the immediately monetizable. We've learned to speak of education as investment, of degrees as credentials, of learning itself as the strategic acquisition of marketable skills. The question “When will I use this?” is simply the logical terminus of how we've trained an entire generation to metabolize knowledge. They've learned our language only too well.

But it's the wrong question. Or rather, it's a question that occludes the actual answer before we've had the chance to articulate what education, real education, is actually for.

Let me tell you what my grandfather did, and what it taught me about uselessness.

He taught Comparative Philology, the study of how languages evolve and fracture and carry forward the ghost of their ancestry, how Sanskrit and Greek and Latin reveal hidden kinship through grammatical structures, how you can trace a word backward through centuries until it dissolves into the root from which a dozen modern languages secretly descend. Useless knowledge, by any contemporary metric. Unmarketable. Impractical. When, after all, does one "use" Comparative Philology? When does the ability to parse Proto-Indo-European root words translate into professional advancement or quarterly results?

And yet the students he taught, and I met some of them, decades later, at his memorial, spoke not of what they had learned but how it helped them to “become” themselves. He had altered, fundamentally, how their minds worked. Not what they knew, but the very architecture of their thinking. He had trained them to see patterns concealed beneath surface chaos, to recognize that apparent differences often mask deep structural similarities, to approach complex systems by looking first for the underlying grammar. One became an epidemiologist, tracing the evolution and mutation of viruses. Another, an architect, learning to see how structural principles repeat across scales and cultures. A third, a diplomat, learning to navigate the subtle architecture of cross-cultural communication.

None of them "used" Comparative Philology. But all of them used what Comparative Philology had trained their minds to do.

In my last post, I had raised again the ancient thought that "the mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled.” We have forgotten this, I think. Or perhaps we never quite believed it. We've grown obsessed with the filling, with content, with facts, with skills that demonstrate obvious and immediate application.

And in doing so, we've lost sight of what education is actually meant to accomplish: not the stockpiling of information, but the transformation of the instrument itself.

Education, real education, trains the mind. It develops intellectual capacities that transfer across domains. It creates habits of thought that will apply to problems we haven't encountered yet, in fields that may not exist when the learning begins, using frameworks we cannot imagine at the starting gate.

When a student learns calculus, genuinely learns it, not merely memorizes procedures for satisfying exams, they are learning to think about rates of change, about accumulation, about how infinitesimal local behaviors compound into large-scale patterns. This proves useful if you become an engineer, obviously. But it proves equally useful if you become a novelist studying how small choices accumulate into character transformation, or a policy analyst tracing how minor regulatory adjustments cascade through systems over time, or simply a parent watching cognitive and emotional development unfold in your own child and learning to recognize which changes are incremental and which are inflection points.

The calculus itself? You may never "use" it directly. But the cognitive capacity it develops, the ability to think rigorously about change, accumulation, and consequence, you will use constantly, often without recognizing that this is what you're doing.

My grandmother taught Physics to young women in an era when such teaching was itself a quiet form of revolution. She would say, and I heard this so often it became something like family liturgy, that she wasn't teaching them about forces and motion and thermodynamic principles. She was teaching them to see the world as something that follows comprehensible laws, something that yields its secrets to careful observation and disciplined analysis, something knowable if you develop the right tools for knowing it.

Some of her students became scientists. Many did not. But all of them carried something forward: a confidence that complexity is not the same as incomprehensibility, that confusion is temporary and yields to sustained inquiry, that the world reveals its patterns to those patient and rigorous enough to look.

This is what we lose when we allow education to become purely utilitarian, when we permit the question "When will I use this?" to drive curriculum, when we let students abandon subjects because they don't map onto obvious career paths. We lose the understanding that learning mathematics teaches you to think precisely, that studying history teaches you to analyze competing narratives and understand how context shapes interpretation, that reading literature teaches you to hold multiple perspectives simultaneously and to recognize that surface simplicity often conceals deep complexity.

These aren't separate skills that apply only within their domains. They're fundamental cognitive capacities that transfer across everything we'll ever do. The student who learns to parse a complex sentence in Latin develops the patience and attention to detail that will serve them later whether they become a lawyer reading contracts, a doctor reading case studies, or a parent reading between the lines of what their teenager is actually saying.

I often think of something Tocqueville had observed: "The Americans... are fond of explaining almost all the actions of their lives by the principle of self-interest rightly understood." We have become, perhaps, too American in this sense when it comes to education. We want everything to justify itself through immediate, tangible returns. We've lost patience for knowledge that doesn't obviously "do" something.

But the deepest forms of learning, the kinds that actually transform how a mind works, often appear useless at first. They're not training you for a specific task. They're training you to think in ways you didn't know were possible. They're expanding what your mind is capable of, not filling it with immediately deployable content.

When I work with the same students over multiple years, I watch this transformation happen. The student who resisted learning proofs in geometry because "I'll never use proofs" discovers, eighteen months later, that the logical reasoning they developed helps them structure debate arguments, or deconstruct political rhetoric, or simply think more clearly about complex decisions. The student who complained about analyzing poetry—"I'm going into business, why does this matter?"—finds that the skill of reading for subtext, for what's implied rather than stated, becomes invaluable in negotiation and leadership.

They didn't "use" geometry or poetry. They used what studying geometry and poetry trained their minds to do.

This is why I push back when parents ask me to help their children avoid "unnecessary" subjects, to optimize their schedule around what's "relevant" to their intended major or career. Not because every subject is equally important for every student—they're not—but because we cannot know, at the age of sixteen or seventeen, which intellectual capacities will prove essential later. We cannot predict which ways of thinking will suddenly become central to problems we haven't yet encountered.

The purpose of a broad education isn't to make you conversant in many subjects. It's to make your mind capable of many different kinds of thinking. It's to ensure that when you face a problem that requires historical analysis, or mathematical precision, or literary interpretation, or scientific reasoning, you have some practice in how to engage that kind of thinking. You have the cognitive flexibility to shift between frameworks, to recognize which mental tools a problem requires.

So when your child asks, or when you wonder, "Why do they need to learn this if they'll never use it?" I'd suggest reframing the question: "What is this teaching them about how to think? What cognitive capacity is being developed? What habit of mind is being formed?"

The content may be temporary. The capacity is permanent.