The Thing About Too Much Knowledge

Every three years, the PISA education assessment comes out over test results and the ratings given to countries.  Asian countries tend to do well.....western countries tend to do less well.

I sat and picked up the standard test from 2015, and looked over the language and math tests (used for Brit kids, 15 year old).  The language test was a breeze.  The math test?  It was a fairly indepth test with a worded scenario.

So they show up an oddly shaped apartment (four rooms and a terrace), and then they ask you to select from the nine possible images below (showing different ways to reach a formula with the measurements)....to reach the square footage for the apartment.

Yes, it is a trick question because the terrace isn't part of the interior.  Because of the nature of this and the nine potential layouts of the measurement-game....you will sit and waste a good five minutes over the drawings to find the appropriate one (or plural). 

This brings me around to this two-year period of high-school where I took algebra and geometry.  It's a vast amount of knowledge that this teacher puts on the table, and you (around age 16 and 17) are assembling this, and trying to grasp where exactly you will need this in the future. 

Then you go and wonder about the 500 students that he handled in a decade period, and if any of them went onto engineering classes, did explosives work, built dams, had to calculate cubic feet of a man-made lake, or needed to figure the amount of concrete needed for a 1,388 feet driveway from the main road to their house.  Out of the 500 kids who were 'blessed' with the knowledge....probably less than 40 ever used this algebraic formula situation or geometric formula ever again in life. 

It is part of this problem about value of knowledge, and if you are handing over to people who will readily admit for the next forty years of their life....they just won't ever again touch it again.