“Interesting” or “Useful” Knowledge? This Misses the Point
What makes something interesting or useful depends on prior knowledge.
Recently I saw the question, Should students be taught things that are interesting or useful? A glance at today’s curriculum would tell you they’re being taught neither — who cares about proving triangles are congruent or balancing chemical equations? Who actually needs it?
But this question gets it backwards. To teach what’s “interesting” assumes we should emphasize what young people would already find interesting. To teach what’s “useful” assumes we can prepare them for what’s already expected to be useful in their lives.
The point is to expand the possibilities of what can be “interesting” and “useful.”
Facts aren’t inherently “interesting.” A fact’s interest value depends on how it updates prior knowledge. News about Kanye West, for example, is interesting to people who are very familiar with his character, but not to people barely aware of him. Similarly, you won’t appreciate the value of a surprising scientific breakthrough if you can’t understand the status quo.
And what would be “useful” to everyone? Maybe how to pay taxes, how to cook an egg, how to clean a bathroom. But these are simple lessons that don’t require much prior knowledge, hence why they can be answered with a simple Google search.
Higher-level knowledge, on the other hand, like calculus for engineering, or genetics for neuroscience, can’t be learned in a day. There are lower concepts that need to be solid before you can begin to grasp them. So while those lessons in algebraic operations and genetic recombination might not have been directly “useful” at the time, they laid groundwork that could prove useful later, in pursuit of a path that would otherwise seem inaccessible.
So rather than the flimsy concepts of interesting or useful, let’s aim for building functional literacy in a domain. It can take a lot of slow, patient learning in a subject to understand why it matters — and what’s so fascinating about it!
