The most pointless school subjects

[LauraSol]

Are there any school subjects you think are/were pointless? Is there anything you wish you'd been taught instead? I'm conducting research, thanks very much!

Games.
I was rubbish at the ones taught at my school and was never going to improve.
I wouldn't have minded some fitness sessions if that's what they were for.

Anything I know about sport I learned later.

Think I got something out of most other subjects including ones I didn't go on to O level (dates me) with.

Home Economics and Needlework when the boys got to do the fun stuff like metalwork, woodwork and technical drawing.
(Showing my age!)

I think that this is rather along the lines of "only boring people get bored". Only pointless people don't get the point.
It's not the subject that is at fault, it's the people!

RE. When i did my O level, it literally was just reading the Bible - lesson after lesson, just going around the class reading it. We didn't even have an exercise book and did absolutely no writing at all. No wonder most of the class got grade U in the exam! Not sure whether it was a crap teacher or just a crap subject. We only had to do it because we were in the top set for Maths - heaven knows how that worked!!

French is pretty useless too. I suppose if you go to France on holiday, bits of it may come in handy, but most people don't go to France. I'd have thought Spanish or Italian may have been more use for more people.

Kazzy, the reasoning wille something to do with loaves and fishes.

*will be

I loved all school subjects and still do.

I think maths gcse nowadays is too hard for lots of people and a life skills type maths exam would be much more relevant.

I can't think of any subject that was truly pointless - and I did Latin O level!

English literature, maths (not numeracy that's helpful). I've never needed to analyse poetry and never needed to solve a simultaneous equation. Instead we should be teaching financial literacy and other useful life skills with the academic subjects as options to those who want to do them

Budgeting would have been useful.

For me...Art. Primary school was fine, Secondary when you have no skill... Pointless.

Latin helps you forever! Games were useless for me because I was so bad at them. Would love to have done a teamwork based lesson which wasn’t a sport. I might have felt useful in a group then.

calculus and algebra. Basic economics micro macro would have been better.
I’ve yet to find X or Y.

For me oddly due to the sector I work in the most useless subjects were Computer Studies and Business Studies.

Computer Studies was just an extension of Maths - I basically had been taught most of the subject in Maths before doing the GCSE - and Business Studies was just an extension of Humanities.

Is any learning pointless? Does it ever hurt to know, understand or be able to do something, even if you'll never use it?

I was terrible at pe and hated the subject at school but that's because the teachers weren't very good at spotting and stopping bullying and actively set up situations where bullying would happen.

P.E. Absolutely humiliating and a waste of time, singular most useful thing was Latin. I haven't used it in any formal context but is generally used most days

History. I think it's important to know what world and national events came before us, but they way it's been taught in schools just turns people off IMO.

Food technology...
The only things we "learnt" to cook were a stir fry and a victoria sponge - both of which I could do already at 15.

Music-the teacher would just put on a movie and fuck off
Drama-we’d just be standing around for an hour
P.e-swimming it keep fit for the longest hour of my life
Science-the teacher stood explaining something where none of us had the first idea what she was on about

Teaching life skills like cooking,how to boss job interviews,how to pay a bill or budgeting would have been much better

I left school without a clue

I think politics should be compulsory throughout KS3 & 4.

I'd drop tech drawing, woodwork, metalwork & art but introduce them at Options stage in place of more academic subjects.

In KS4 I'd make 'life skills' compulsory - budgeting, pensions, form filling (driving licence/passport/benefits etc), Highway Code, loans (what APR means etc).

At ds school they have just spent nearly 3 years studying ethics but have decided that there won't be a GCSE qualification in it, that is 2 hours a week that could have been spent on something else, maybe extra lessons in GCSE subjects, plus PE which considering most of the Y11 pupils avoid doing PE is another hour could be spent on GCSE work.

Food technology seems rubbish compared to what used to be home ec., or just cookery.

I learned how to make pastry (s/c, suet, rough puff and choux); bake bread; make marmalade; make white sauce (and how to flavour it differently); roast a chicken...
As well as budgeting and a lot of the science of food and cooking too.

I lost faith in FT when I had to buy the first jar of random dried mixed herbs that I'd bought since I was a student, so my daughter could make spag bol. Well, it certainly wasn't bolognese.

Sorry - replying to PhDone

The only thing I would describe as pointless was computing, I’m old and this was back in days of the school BBC micro computer. Computer lessons consisted of either typing in lines of code copied from a sheet to make the computer do a simple function, usually making a word appear and fill the screen dozens of times over, or loading programmes from a cassette tape, complete with screeching noises and bleeps. This took around 20 mins, often failed mid load and by the time it had loaded the lesson had almost ended.