> Lastly I note that it's mostly math class that gets asked this "what's the point" question.
I think it tends to come up as a way of resisting something hard and unpleasant, and math tends to be the subject that most often feels hard and unpleasant to a plurality of young people. Of course most of us, if we had been freed from HS math as teenagers and left to our own devices, would not have gone off to do something really useful. We would have instead spent that time on something far more useless, like browsing HN. :-)
Also, we would be gullible to whatever new trend is invented by the people who do master those topics. I have interns upset because I don’t want to pay them in bitcoins or give them shares in the company, while we’re quietly churning 1m$ ARR with just two engineers and myself (and others are doing orders of magnitude better). The same interns getting tired after 3 lines of documentation and suggesting that every documentation page should be a video, generated by those american SAAS for a hefty price. They are basically illiterate trying to cover their lack of skills.
The divide between those who use and those who get used is getting wider. And I don’t appreciate belonging to the first group, knowing how little my wisdom is.
I think math feels hard and unpleasant to most students because the way it is taught is often extremely outdated.
In primary school for example, we learn maths by memorising times tables and solving thousands of basic arithmetic problems. This was important in a time before calculators as being able to compute functions is a skill that students might need.
Today though, arithmetic should be taught, not because it might be useful, but because from arithmetic we can discover interesting properties about numbers themselves. I think maths would have been more interesting if you showed students how properties of pure numbers have this nice association with any set of real world objects that can be ordered.
> In primary school for example, we learn maths by memorising times tables and solving thousands of basic arithmetic problems. This was important in a time before calculators...
I used to think like you on this point, until I taught students who were brought up using calculators instead of memorizing multiplication tables, etc. It turns out that many of them could not figure out how to use calculators when needed--they didn't know what to enter because they were rarely required to do any mental math. It's really important for elementary school students to count out loud (including by 2's, 3's, etc.), and count backwards, and memorize multiplication tables, etc., so they are comfortable and confident doing basic arithmetic. Calculators are for people who already understand how to do arithmetic.
I think it tends to come up as a way of resisting something hard and unpleasant, and math tends to be the subject that most often feels hard and unpleasant to a plurality of young people. Of course most of us, if we had been freed from HS math as teenagers and left to our own devices, would not have gone off to do something really useful. We would have instead spent that time on something far more useless, like browsing HN. :-)