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!

Necessary: sex ed; dealing with money I.e budgeting, banking, tax etc; cooking (proper meals and not just a fruit salad!),

Unnecessary: PE! I always used to give notes to my kids to give to the teacher excusing them from PE. They never did a sports day either! Waste of time

Also drama is pointless

Mine all loved PE. Children need exercise don't they?

This thread is fucking depressing.

Replacing History with lessons on how to check your credit rating?

Shoot me now.

@Trewser

Well, fgs. PARENTS can teach their kids all those things.

In fact @Trewser let's not teach our kids important stuff about money management, debt etc because kids have no idea how you pay a bill, how you buy a house, how not paying your bills getting into debt goes on your credit file. How many teenagers have any idea about this then go off spending, get into debt at a young age screwing their chances up of owning their own home.?

YOU can teach them those things! I don't know about you, but I think that's my job as a parent. School can touch on it, but really! That's literally your job!

Yes as a parent I can, however I have no say over what they get taught at school. Now anything else you want to argue with @Trewser ??

children need exercise don’t they?

Well, fgs. PARENTS can teach their kids all those things

Well, fgs. PARENTS can encourage their kids to exercise outside of school time

French is spoken in Europe, several African countries (I think) and Canada. So quite useful compared to German.

Yes, they can. But PE and sports science is a degree level subject, so there's a bit more to it than most parents understand.

Moobaa Our school does the Norman Conquest rather than America. I remembered doing the Normans in primary so I mentioned the Bayeaux Tapestry but dd didn't have a clue what I was talking about. (She got an 8!)

I think that the GCSE syllabus is pretty odd. I did Cold War like my dd but covered Russian Revolution, Mccarthyism, and Cultural Revolution so the Cold War (Vietnam etc) made made more sense. We didn't have random modules like Normans.

So basically you’re basing your answers off what subjects can be translated into a degree?
Financial matters can encourage kids to go into accountancy, economics or even politics. They’re all degrees.

Why is PE and sports more important than finances?

PE and sports science is a degree level subject, so there's a bit more to it than most parents understand
And just because it can be a degree level subject, it doesn’t make it necessarily profitable or valuable in the long run. My DD’s friend at uni did sports at uni but he switched in the third year to do something else because he ‘realised it wouldn’t get him anywhere’

Because telling your children how to budget takes one family meal. It would be hard to string it out over a term

Financial matters can encourage kids to go into accountancy, economics or even politics yes. Maths does. And economics.

@Trewser why are you assuming that it would have to be strung out over a term? They could do one lesson on budgeting, one lesson on credit, one lesson on banking, one on accounts etc etc. It’s not like they’d be doing budgeting for one term then credit ratings for another term...

My DD’s friend at uni did sports at uni but he switched in the third year to do something else because he ‘realised it wouldn’t get him anywhere’ well that's fine. There are lots of jobs for sports graduates though if you do it at a decent uni.

Maths does. And economics
Yes but how useful really is maths beyond percentages, fractions, etc? I’ve never had to use standard deviation post-exam. Why not teach kids basic maths that’s necessary for life and then go into teaching them how to put that maths into practice I.e adding teaching about finances into the mix.

Basically everything apart from English, maths and maybe a bit of science. I don't remember much else from school, even if I did, I don't use it much.

I've been saying that since I left school strictly school should definitely teach children about mortgages, credit, how to manage finances. Things they will actually need to know when they leave school. I can honestly say, apart from pretty basic arithmetic that I would have known by the time I was 12 or younger, I have used no maths during my life after school.

So theposters who have never used standard deviation or other statistical skills, trigonometry or algebra don’t want any kids to learn it. No, just teach them basic maths, budgeting (I’m with @Trewser on this one - an hour tops and you’ve done basic household budgeting) and what a credit score is.

You do realise that businesses need people with maths and coding skills, right? The curriculum you just described is hardly likely to churn out the next generation of tech entrepreneurs. Are you the same people complaining when Britain slips down the GDP rankings?

Bobby Seagull is in this month’s Economia (the magazine for chartered accountants!) talking about the need to improve numeracy in young adults. He talks about a charity, National Numeracy, who reckon that 50% of adults in the UK have the number skills of an eleven year old. I am unsurprised.

That’s not going to change if we go down the ‘just teach them basic maths because I’ve never used it’ road, is it? Teaching kids more complex maths skills helps them to apply reasoning and, as a previous poster sensibly noted, challenge wonky evidence and statistics.

Also, the ‘just teach them maths for life skills’ approach more or less guarantees that the highly paid jobs in investment banking, fund management, accountancy and corporate finance will go to privately educated kids. Great idea, eh?

I grew up in a poor suburb. Being taught intellectually challenging stuff got me out of it and into a good university. Where would I be now if I’d just been taught basic number skills and had never been introduced to speaking another language, or Shakespeare, or medieval history, or the periodic table, because somebody decided that I wouldn’t need those things? In a crap job, and much less happy than I am now, I imagine.

I hated pe and games at school, but I think this was largely how it was organised and run. I had zero enthusiasm for standing on a freezing cold playground wearing a gym skirt and rugby shirt and chasing a hockey ball around. In year 11 we got a new teacher and she let us choose what sport she wanted to do. I used to go swimming quite a lot and it was far more appealing to me. Based on the dc schools, games lessons do seem to have moved towards this idea, which is far better.
I also couldn’t see the point of art, but loved music, so would have happily swapped those. Also, french. My parents wanted me to do a MFL, so I did, biggest waste of time, I have never needed to ask a french person the way to the local swimming pool and that is pretty much all I remember.

Dd has picked her options and just started her gcse courses, I think she is really lucky to have ditched the subjects she can’t stand a year earlier than I was able to.