School Is Useless Quotes & Sayings

Business schools make a fortune forcing their students to take in a HUGE amount of information. The majority of it is theoretical. The majority of that is useless. — Josh Kaufman

Reconciliation means that those who have been on the underside of history must see that there is a qualitative difference between repression and freedom. And for them, freedom translates into having a supply of clean water, having electricity on tap; being able to live in a decent home and have a good job; to be able to send your children to school and to have accessible health care. I mean, what's the point of having made this transition if the quality of life of these people is not enhanced and improved? If not, the vote is useless.'
-archbishop Desmond Tutu, chair of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Committee, 2001 — Naomi Klein

The most important thing I would learn in school was that almost everything I would learn in school would be utterly useless. When I was fifteen I knew the principal industries of the Ruhr Valley, the underlying causes of World War One and what Peig Sayers had for her dinner every day ... What I wanted to know when I was fifteen was the best way to chat up girls. That is what I still want to know. — Joseph O'Connor

Well, Diotallevi and I are planning a reform in higher education. A School of Comparative Irrelevance, where useless or impossibe courses are given. The school's aim is to turn out scholars capable of endlessly increasing the number of unnecessary subjects. — Umberto Eco

Useless labor, that I feared would stay in my mind, extending into me, into everything. On the occasion of both funerals I made plans ahead of time to visit Pasquale. In those years I did that whenever I could. In prison he had studied a lot, had received his high school diploma, and, recently, a — Elena Ferrante

Hannah is missing school because one night, her father exiled her and her mother and Allison from the house. This was, obviously, somewhat insane. But it wasn't more insane or cruel than other things he's done, which is not to say he's insane or cruel all the time. He's himself; he can be perfectly pleasant; he's the weather system they live with , and all the behavior, whenever he is around, hinges on his mood. Don't the three of them understand that living with him simply is what it is? To complain or resist would be as useless as complaining about or resisting a tornado. — Curtis Sittenfeld

I left school at 15 feeling fairly useless and not really up to scratch in my education. And I still suffer sometimes from that lack of education. — Pierce Brosnan

As you can see, I have memorized this utterly useless piece of information long enough to pass a test question. I now intend to forget it forever. You've taught me nothing except how to cynically manipulate the system. Congratulations. — Bill Watterson

All the geography, trigonometry, and arithmetic in the world are useless unless you learn to think for yourself. No school teaches you that. It's not on the curriculum. — Carlos Ruiz Zafon

What we lack is a basic willingness to see literature as providing some kind of necessary foundation. Our society still expects schools to prepare their charges for work only and not for life. As such, literature is construed as at best technically useless and random, at worst socially disruptive. — Gwee Li Sui

But later in high school she became both bored and confused. Bored at the trivia she was taught and confused by the inconsistencies of the teachers who taught it. She wanted to learn how to deal with reality and evaluate it objectively, how to think. She was taught that language has no meaning, poetry needs no structure, and philosophy is fine in theory but useless in practice. — Alexandra York

The higher my GPA gets the more I realize high school is useless — Megan McCafferty

The situation would be very much the same if we should place a teacher who, according to our conception of the term, is scientifically prepared, in one of the public schools where the children are repressed in the spontaneous expression of their personality till they are almost like dead beings. In such a school the children, like butterflies mounted on pins, are fastened each to his place, the desk, spreading the useless wings of barren and meaningless knowledge which they have acquired. — Maria Montessori

I didn't really have a favourite subject at school as I was useless at everything. — Anthony Horowitz

By the sound of things, you know nothing about mathematics.'
'You can put it like that. I'm utterly useless.'
'Useless is such a harsh word, you are merely ... inexperienced. So I thought we could start at the beginning.'
'I'm not that stupid. I know how to add, subtract and multiply-'
'I don't mean that kind of beginning ... — Charlotte Munro

Freedom translates into having a supply of clean water, having electricity on tap; being able to live in a decent home and have a good job; to be able to send your children to school and to have accessible healthcare. I mean what's the point of having made this transition if the quality of life ... is not enhanced and improved? If not, the vote is useless. — Desmond Tutu

Well, I hate it when authors come into a school and they say to kids, 'Write from your heart, only write what you know, and write from your heart.' I hate that because it's useless. I've written over 300 books - not one was written from my heart. Not one. They were all written for an audience, they were all written to entertain a certain audience. — R.L. Stine

So I told the lady Biology and high school were useless crap, I was going to get a job, and I was never coming back to school.
And I didn't.
Yeah, I sure showed them. — Diana Rowland

I mean, if you're really plunging - you said plunging, right? - into this book, then tethering yourself to every single guidepost along the way isn't really going to make that happen." Mr. Tipton's mirth was palpable. "So you think critical reading is a useless activity? That your classmates are just, what, not experiencing the book?" "I think the best way to experience this book is to let it happen to you and think about what it all means later." "Later when?" "Later when you're a high school English teacher. — Mira Jacob

School is a jail, people want there a lot of and when you are out of school what you know from school you remember few and it's useless. So far 12 years at school... (Take it 12 years at jail!) — Deyth Banger

Creativity is paradoxical. To create, a person must have knowledge but forget the knowledge, must see unexpected connections in things but not have a mental disorder, must work hard but spend time doing nothing as information incubates, must create many ideas yet most of them are useless, must look at the same thing as everyone else, yet see something different, must desire success but embrace failure, must be persistent but not stubborn, and must listen to experts but know how to disregard them.
[Twelve Things You Were Not Taught in School About Creative Thinking (The Creativity Post, December 6, 2011)] — Michael Michalko

Searching for a boy in high school is as useless as searching for meaning in a Pauly Shore movie. — Cher

1. Milo There was once a boy named Milo who didn't know what to do with himself - not just sometimes, but always. When he was in school he longed to be out, and when he was out he longed to be in. On the way he thought about coming home, and coming home he thought about going. Wherever he was he wished he were somewhere else, and when he got there he wondered why he'd bothered. Nothing really interested him - least of all the things that should have. "It seems to me that almost everything is a waste of time," he remarked one day as he walked dejectedly home from school. "I can't see the point in learning to solve useless problems, or subtracting turnips from turnips, or knowing where Ethiopia is or how to spell February." And, since no one bothered to explain otherwise, he regarded the process of seeking knowledge as the greatest waste of time of all. — Norton Juster

Something went greatly wrong in our collective history and the starting point of it was the industrial revolution. Our school systems are focussed on a single objective: to produce model citizens for society in order to feed this machine and prevent its breakdown. That's why our school systems have no interest in developing models that actually require and stimulate useful values in people, such as courage or imagination or inventiveness.
None of these are taught in our schools, on the contrary the system focuses on memorizing. Memorizing is a way of overloading the mind with mental baggage it doesn't really need. Besides being horribly dull and stiffening the effect of 20 years of abundant memorization training is modern man: an unimaginative creature stuffed with useless knowledge and unable to clean his mind of this information dirt: our school systems are purposely constructed to deliver mental automatons that are unable to think creatively. — Martijn Benders

What about your school? It's defective, it's a pack of useless lies. — Meat Loaf

High School is like a spork: it's a crappy spoon and a crappy fork, so in the end it's just plain useless. — John Mayer

The best year so far as for me when I am a children it's when I finish school and start doing something else which is more useful... Games are useful, aren't they?
Facts also, aren't they?
... Aren't they? — Deyth Banger

But for the rest of us, cool has a shelf life. If you're a quarterback in high school, you're cool. But ten years later, working as a sullen bouncer at the only nightclub in town, your "cool" is on life support. Which is why so many young girls who never said no end up with losers in pants hanging below their asses and no known income to speak of. These cads were charming in high school; now they're as useless as shoulder pads on a snake. — Greg Gutfeld

I don't have any experience with film schools. I suspect that they're useless, because I've had experience with drama schools, and have found them to be useless. — David Mamet

Don't you know that's what college is about ... students spending years gathering useless information they'll never use again, going hopelessly into debt, just so they feel smarter than the rest of their family? I mean, that's why I worked so hard to get here, anyway. — A.L. Jackson

Well, the traveling teachers do come through every few months," said the Baron.
"Yes, sir, I know, sir, and they're useless, sir. They teach facts, not understanding. It's like teaching people about forests by showing them a saw. I want a proper school, sir, to teach reading and writing, and most of all thinking, sir, so people can find what they're good at, because someone doing what they really like is always an asset to any country, and too often people never find out until it's too late. — Terry Pratchett

David would enter the crucible of suffering where truly great servants of God are made. Perhaps you are there now. One of the most devastating realities of this kind of suffering is that often the one you thought would be your protector becomes the one who measures out the pain. All that longing for justice, for fairness, for having everything as it should be seems useless. As you think on the glory days of the past, your heart aches to turn back the clock, but you can't. In these moments it's tempting to believe that God has forgotten about us, or even worse, that He simply doesn't care - His favor has moved on. If you are there right now, my heart aches for you. No one signs up for this school of suffering, and yet the deep work that God does in this painful, lonely place is rarely produced anywhere else. — Sheila Walsh

Mrs. Weasley glanced at the grandfather clock in the corner. Harry liked this clock. It was completely useless if you wanted to know the time, but otherwise very informative. It had nine golden hands, and each of them was engraved with one of the Weasley family's names. There were no numerals around the face, but descriptions of where each family member might be. "Home," "school," and "work" were there, but there was also "traveling," "lost," "hospital," "prison," and, in the position where the number twelve would be on a normal clock, "mortal peril. — J.K. Rowling