Core Subjects are More than Just Test and Forget by Lorelei

Core Subjects are More than Just Test and Forget by Lorelei - September 2025 Scholarship Essay

There have always been the people who see absolutely no point in education, who whine, “Why do I need to take trigonometry? I’m never going to use this in real life.” These students are misguided, albeit understandably so. Our teachers keep telling us that our classes are important for our future, but we never see the payoff. Very few people actually use calculus or biology in their daily lives, so why does the educational system make all of us learn these subjects?

The purpose of an education beyond the basic skills required to survive in our modern society is two-fold: to give us the skills to better understand the world around us and to give us the skills we require to interact with it. Science and social sciences consistently provide us the former, while mathematics and language arts provide the latter.

We take classes like physics, biology, and chemistry to understand how the Earth and the universe that surrounds it functions. This knowledge may not apply to our daily lives, but the methods by which this knowledge was discovered absolutely does. The scientific method can be used to determine why a dishwasher is malfunctioning, the best way to set up your garden, and so forth. What science classes truly teach us is how to take what we know and use it to prove something else true. Social sciences teach us similar skills, but, obviously, in relation to our society. History and geography classes teach us names and dates that we forget a week after the test, but they also teach us how our society is structured and how we got to this point. Truly learning history means learning how to look at our past and extrapolate for our future. It helps us to understand the situation in which we live and how to do better for our descendants.

If you don’t have a mathematics-oriented brain, math classes won’t do much in terms of explaining the world to you. But, they will teach you problem solving, logical reasoning, tenacity, and how to collaborate with others. These are all soft skills that are essential for any career. Similarly, an English class might not be valuable because you read Shakespeare or Tolkien. It’s value comes from teaching both the skills to analyze and produce effective communication. If you’ve ever read a text from a friend and wondered which of about fourteen ways they meant for you to take it, you understand why learning to analyze communication and context is important. And obviously, being able to convey your thoughts and ideas well is invaluable, because it saves both time and relationships.

While I have been lucky enough to pull all of these valuable lessons from my education, not everyone has teachers and opportunities as helpful as mine. My biggest hope for education in the next ten years is that teachers focus more on the practical skills students need from education, not simply facts. These experiences foster a lifelong love of and care for education, and our education system simply cannot improve if people don’t know enough about it to care. So I hope that our focus shifts slightly to skills that are internalized rather than facts that are memorized. I hope people start to look back at their schooling with fondness. I hope people start to care, just a little bit more.