This statement sounds harsh until you actually stop to think about it. What do most adults actually use from their years of schooling? Reading, writing, and basic math are essential. No question. You need to read contracts, write emails, calculate tips, manage a budget. Those are non-negotiable. But everything beyond that? For the vast majority of people, it's just trivia.

Think about biology. Most adults couldn't name the parts of a cell or explain photosynthesis. They don't need to. They live perfectly fine without it. Think about geometry. When was the last time you used the Pythagorean theorem? Unless you're in construction or engineering, probably never. Think about history. Do you remember the dates of major battles or the terms of obscure treaties? No, because they don't matter to your daily life. Think about literature. Do you still remember the symbolism in the novels you were forced to read? Most people don't, and they're not worse off for it.

This isn't an argument against knowledge. It's an argument against forced knowledge. There's nothing wrong with learning biology if you're interested in it. There's nothing wrong with studying history if it matters to you. There's nothing wrong with reading literature if it enriches your life. But forcing everyone to learn everything, regardless of interest or relevance, is a massive waste of time and energy.

Consider the scale of this waste. Thirteen years. Eleven thousand hours. That's more time than most people spend on any single activity in their lives. And for what? So that adults can forget almost all of it and still function perfectly well. The system consumes the most precious resource young people have—their time—and delivers almost nothing of lasting value.

The tragedy is that those thousands of hours could have been spent on things that actually matter. A kid who loves working with his hands could have spent those hours becoming a master carpenter. A kid who loves helping people could have spent them volunteering and learning to care for others. A kid who loves technology could have spent them coding and building. Instead, they spent them sitting in classrooms, memorizing facts for tests they'd soon forget.

This waste is especially cruel for low-income kids. They don't have margin. They don't have safety nets. Every hour spent on trivia is an hour not spent on something that might actually lift them out of poverty. The system takes their most valuable asset—time—and squanders it on things that won't help them succeed. Then it blames them when they struggle.

Think about what "useful activities" actually means. It means learning skills that lead to self-sufficiency. It means developing the kind of deep knowledge that actually gets used. It means practicing things that will matter in real life. It means having time to explore interests, discover passions, and build the kind of expertise that leads to meaningful work.

The objection to this is always the same: "But what if they need that knowledge later?" The answer is simple: they can learn it later, when they actually need it. People do this all the time. Adults learn new skills constantly—on the job, through online courses, from mentors, by reading. The idea that everything must be learned before age 18 or it's lost forever is completely false. Learning is lifelong. The only thing lost is the time wasted on things that never mattered.

This isn't about dumbing down education. It's about making it real. It's about admitting that most of what we force on kids is forgettable and forgotten. It's about redirecting those thousands of hours to things that actually help people live well. Reading, writing, and basic math are the foundation. Everything else should be chosen, not forced. That's not radical. That's just honest.

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