“When are we gonna use this, anyway?”

I know you’ve heard the complaint. Students pull it out for everything from math facts to adverbial phrases to history dates. Thankfully, our 21st century skills report provides the answer.

Here’s my own analogy to explain. A friend of mine recently went through boot camp. In order to prepare him for combat, the Army had him do a mind-numbing amount of pushups.

But what’s the point? If he’s in combat, he’s not going to do a pushup, is he? When’s he gonna use that, anyway?

You and I know the answer. He does the pushups to exercise his muscles, so that he can be strong enough to do the harder, more complex, and unpredictable physical challenges he’ll find on the battlefield.

The report on 21st century skills finds the same thing. It finds:

Along with the rhetoric about “21st century skills,” a myth has spread in some circles that students will no longer need to learn the academic content traditionally taught in the school curriculum. After all, why
do you need to know “that stuff” if you can look it up on Google? … But …cognitive scientists have found that a broad vocabulary and sufficient background knowledge about the world—the kind of things students learn in science and social studies classes, for example—are hugely important for strong reading comprehension. The more you know, the easier it is to learn new things…

And building that background knowledge often means doing a lot of basic exercises.

Sometimes doing the extra 10 math problems, like the extra 10 pushups, will be taxing. Sometimes it will be boring. But it’s always going to be useful. –Rebecca St. Andrie