The Use of Useless Things

Every teacher knows the moment when a pupil asks, When will I ever use this? Faced with the challenge, we often scramble for a neat and practical justification, offering some twee scenario in which the knowledge at hand might one day prove handy. We do this with good intentions, yet every time we play this game, we reinforce a profound misconception about the purpose of schooling.

For schools are, or ought to be, autonomous institutions. Places where becoming learned is not a means to an end but an end in itself.

Autonomous institutions follow their own internal impulses. They exist not to chase utility but to cultivate the life of the mind. Knowledge emerges within such institutions much as blood circulates through a body. It sustains life, but it is also sustained by the life it helps to create. Its value is intrinsic, long before any practical consequence appears.

History is littered with examples that show how absurd, even impossible, it is to predict the future usefulness of knowledge. Nobody believed that ten years of Latin and Greek would one day prepare civil servants to administer the most diverse empire the world had ever seen. Nobody foresaw that the abstruse algebraic work of Boole and the philosophical logic of Frege would form the deep foundations of the digital age. The Reverend Thomas Bayes pursued a mathematical curiosity in private correspondence with no conception of the revolution his theorem would bring to modern statistics.

Knowledge arises because people pursue questions for their own sake, within institutions that protect curiosity from the tyranny of immediate goals.

Governments may attempt to steer research toward social goods, but at best these are informed guesses. They cannot foresee discovery. They cannot legislate for breakthrough. Astrophysics, for example, receives enormous amounts of public and private funding and produces awe, insight, and profound expansions of human understanding. Perhaps, one day, it will help us overcome the challenge of a changing climate, but, to date, it has delivered nothing remotely useful. It stands as a model illustration of the extraordinary use of useless things.

Modern educational discourse too often treats schools as engines of economic optimisation. Their success is measured through spreadsheets of performance indicators and league tables. The narrative is one of efficiency, usefulness, productivity. Children become human capital. Teachers become deliverers of outcomes. Knowledge becomes a tool for employability.

What disappears in this framing is education itself.

When schools lean into utility, they narrow the horizons of the young. They create the impression that the world is only worth knowing if it can be monetised or operationalised. They turn the boundless landscape of human thought into a checklist of competencies.

The tragedy of this is not simply cultural. It is profoundly practical. A society that insists knowledge must justify itself in advance will, inevitably, impoverish its future. If nobody pursues the “useless,” nothing genuinely new can ever emerge.

The real work of schools is to induct young people into humanity’s great conversation. To help them encounter ideas, forms, structures, languages, patterns, images, arguments, and stories that they would never discover alone. To show them the power and joy of thinking.

Learning mathematics is not valuable because pupils might one day calculate mortgage rates. It is valuable because mathematics is one of humanity’s great ways of seeing. Studying history is not important because pupils need to know dates, but because they need to understand the long arc of human striving. Reading literature is not useful because it increases vocabulary for job interviews. It matters because it reveals the human condition and enlarges the inner life.

A civilised society does not educate its young to make them employable. It educates its young because education is what makes civilisation possible.

Ironically, the more a society protects spaces in which curiosity can flourish without constraint, the more likely it is to generate discoveries that transform the world. But this is a secondary effect, not the purpose. It is a byproduct of intellectual freedom.

The use of useless things is that they allow humanity to grow wiser, broader, deeper, and occasionally more capable. They protect the soil from which unforeseen breakthroughs emerge.

Teachers do not control policy. They do not set national priorities. But they have immense influence over the intellectual climate of their classrooms.

When pupils ask When will I ever use this? we can smile gently and say:

You may never use it. But learning it will make you more capable of understanding the world. And sometimes that is reason enough.

We can defend the intrinsic worth of knowledge. We can show our pupils that the world is richer than utility. We can model curiosity that is not instrumental, but generous and open.

If schools reclaim their role as autonomous institutions dedicated to learning for its own sake, we will not only enrich the lives of today’s pupils. We will create the conditions for future generations to surprise us with knowledge we cannot yet imagine.

Education is not preparation for life. It is life. And the “useless” things we learn along the way often turn out to be the most important things of all.