---
title: "Why do I need to learn this?"
date: 2026-07-24
category: tanker
excerpt: "As a teacher and parent I have heard this too many times. This is my response."
---

"Why do I need to learn this?"

If you have spent any time around young people — or been one — you have heard
it. I have heard it as a teacher and as a parent more times than I can count,
usually about maths, and often with real frustration behind it. It is a fair
question, and it deserves a real answer, not "because it is on the exam." I
have two. The first is uncomfortable. The second is hopeful.

## First: if you do not know much, you can be made to believe almost anything

Let me show you rather than tell you. I promise not to lie — every fact I am
about to give you is true. Watch how it goes anyway.

You know how a campfire works. Stand close and you are too hot; step back and
you go cold. Heat is a matter of distance. Now, the sun is simply the biggest
fire there is, so the same rule must hold: the closer the Earth is to the sun,
the warmer we are. That is why space is freezing — it is far from the sun. It
is why Mercury, the nearest planet, is a furnace, and the far-off planets are
frozen rock. Distance from the sun means temperature. So far, so good.

Here is the part most people never learned. The Earth's orbit is not a perfect
circle. It is a slightly squashed oval — an ellipse. We have known this for
four hundred years, since Kepler. So the Earth really does swing closer to the
sun for part of the year and further away for the rest, by about five million
kilometres. A real, measured fact.

Put it together. An oval orbit — sometimes near the fire, sometimes far. Near
the sun: summer. Far from it: winter. That is why July is warm and December is
cold. The whole planet leans toward the fire and back again. It makes complete
sense, and it is built on real astronomy.

You are convinced. You might even think it is obvious.

So let me ask you one thing. Right now it is summer where I am writing. What
season is it in Australia?

It is winter. Christmas on the beach. When we are freezing, they are
sunbathing — and when we sweat in July, they reach for a coat.

But Australia is on the *same Earth.* At that moment we are the exact same
distance from the sun that they are — one planet, one orbit. If "closer means
summer" were true, the whole world would have summer at once and winter at
once. It is impossible for us to be roasting and them freezing at the same
distance from the same fire. The entire story just collapsed on a single
question — and you already knew the answer.

(For the record: the Earth is actually *closest* to the sun in early January,
the dead of our winter. The story was not merely incomplete; for half the
planet it was exactly backwards. The real cause is the tilt of the Earth — the
half leaning toward the sun gets summer, the half leaning away gets winter.
That is why the two are always opposite.)

Now notice what I did. I never told you one false thing. The campfire is real.
Space is cold. The orbit really is an oval. Every brick was true — I only
stacked them into a wrong wall. And you could not catch it by knowing *more*
astronomy. You caught it the moment you stopped and asked, "wait — does this
fit something I already know?" And you *did* already know about Australia. It
sat in your mind the whole time, unused.

We live in an age that says: why learn anything, when you can just look it up?
But think about *when* you would have looked this up. You only search for
something once you have already decided to doubt it — and nothing here *felt*
wrong, so you never reached for your phone. A search engine can hand you a
fact. It cannot hand you the instinct that a fact is missing. That instinct is
not downloaded; it is built, slowly, out of everything you have taken the
trouble to learn. The less you carry inside you, the more you are at the mercy
of whoever happens to be talking — and someone is always talking who profits
from you not knowing enough to check.

## Second: everything you learn is a building block

Here is the hopeful half.

Every single thing you learn is a brick — a piece of Lego. On its own, one
brick does not look like much. But bricks *connect.* Two ideas you picked up in
different years suddenly click together and let you understand a third thing
nobody ever taught you. That is what solving a problem is. It is what inventing
something new is — almost never a brand-new brick, but an old brick nobody
thought to snap onto that one.

So the person with a big box of bricks can build what the person with ten
bricks simply cannot. Not because they are cleverer — because they have more to
work with.

"But I do not know which bricks I will need!" You are right. You cannot. You
are young; you literally cannot see your own future. But people who have
already walked the road ahead of you have looked back and worked out which
bricks you are most likely to need — and that is what a subject in school
actually *is.* Not a random pile, but a box packed by people saying, "trust us,
you will want this one." You are free to bet your own view against all of them.
I would not take that bet.

Let me finish with a true story. I once saw a man online, furious. He said
school had wasted his life teaching him maths — he claimed he had used *less
than five per cent* of it, ever.

And he wrote this in a long, careful argument about *percentages.*

He used maths to complain that maths is useless. He could not have made his own
point — "five per cent" — without understanding the very thing he was calling a
waste. The tool was in his hand *while he argued the tool was worthless.*

That is the quiet truth about the bricks. They do not sit on a shelf labelled
"used twice." They *dissolve into how you think.* Percentages, ratios, logic,
estimation, cause and effect — you use them a hundred times a day without
noticing, because they stopped being "school maths" and became part of your
mind. He did not use five per cent of his maths. He used it constantly — so
constantly he forgot it was there. A Lego brick buried deep in the model, one
you never see from the outside, is still holding the whole thing up. That is
most of what you learn. You will not see it. You will stand on it.

## Why this is more than practical

For me, both of these are more than practical — they are close to the heart of
faith.

Scripture never once praises the person who believes whatever he is told. It
praises the opposite. When the Apostle Paul himself came preaching, the people
the Bible calls *noble* were the ones who would not simply take his word for it:

> "...they received the word with all readiness of mind, and searched the
> scriptures daily, whether those things were so." — Acts 17:11

They fact-checked an apostle, and God calls that noble. Paul does not resent
it; he commands it, in one plain sentence:

> "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." — 1 Thessalonians 5:21

Because the danger is real. The untaught believer, Paul warns, gets

> "...tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the
> sleight of men, and cunning craftiness, whereby they lie in wait to deceive."
> — Ephesians 4:14

*Sleight. Cunning. Craftiness.* False teaching almost never *looks* false. It
looks exactly like my little story about the seasons — true-sounding pieces,
carefully stacked into a lie. The teaching that costs you is never the absurd
one you laugh off. It is the reasonable one you cannot check, because you never
learned enough to see the crack.

And so I cannot hear "why do I need to learn this?" as anything but a spiritual
question. Hosea did not say God's people perish for lack of *access* to
knowledge — his people had prophets standing in front of them.

> "My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge." — Hosea 4:6

For lack of knowledge they had *taken in.* Made their own. Learned well enough
to reach for in the moment they needed it.

So fill your mind. Fill your box with bricks. Not to win arguments — but so you
can build a life, and so you cannot be quietly led away from the truth you were
given. Jesus did not say a search bar would set you free. He said,

> "...ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." — John 8:32

*Know* it. Not look it up once you finally grow suspicious — but carry it, the
way you already carried Australia, ready for the moment you need it most.