The man who invented imaginary numbers described them as useless.

Imaginary numbers are numbers that are the square root of negative numbers, i.e. numbers that cannot exist. Yet, we are forced to learn to use them in high school math class. According to Wikipedia, "imaginary numbers have essential concrete applications in a variety of sciences and related areas such as signal processing, control theory, electromagnetism, quantum mechanics, cartography, vibration analysis and many others."

So, apparently, there are real uses for numbers that don't exist, for people who study signal processing and electromagnetism. I feel that the vast majority of high school graduates will not go on to delve into their passions for quantum mechanics, although anyone who reads this might now go, "Vibration analysis! Fuck yeah vibration analysis!...I'd like to analyze your vibrations, shorty. They'd have to measure our lovemaking in imaginary numbers."

So why would a standard education require you to learn about something that only has meaning for a ridiculously small percentage of the population, and for the rest will remain in memory until they're tested on it, at which point it will be wiped clean by Flo Rida's newest explosion of lyrical poesy? My only guess is that Extraordinary Emphasis on Math and Science have taken our educational systems by the haunches and dry-humped it into compliance. If not, why not learn about how to illustrate a manuscript like medieval Irish monks, or memorizing jet pilot manuals, or tailoring, or the biology and natural history of cephalopods, or some equally obscure thing only applicable to one particular and narrow field?

This is not just about imaginary numbers, though. There's also The Tawdry Realms of Chemistry, Physics, and Calculus. And lest you think I'm just picking on math and science, I'll throw in obligatory high school English Literature, and also probably The Mostly Insignificant History of Your Particular State. While things like this get pumped up in the curriculum, other, more important aspects of real life get axed or tossed in haphazardly like a random sock you just found on the floor into your laundry, like music, art, religion, and world history.

I'm not saying that math and science are not important. Up to a certain point, they are essential. But that point is at the intersection of things people need to know to function as responsible people within a larger framework of a non-human world, like environmental science, biology, ecology, natural science and prehistory, basic anatomy and medicine, arithmetic and algebra, and so forth, and things that people only need to know if they are going to become professional doctors, scientists, nuclear physicists, or manipulators of the space-time continuum.

Mathematics also has the advantage of forcing you to think on an entirely rational plane in an entirely theoretical universe. This, I'm sure, is helpful to the developing mind, but again, there's a point when you're just spanking dead horse ass.

Science and math are pushed, of course, because a) many people are not really interested in them on a professional level, and b) the country and the parents of the world want people to be interested in them on a professional level, because that is where money comes from, and better technology, ever since the Industrial Revolution, has made your country look way more awesome than all the other countries. Do you think Japan is awesome? Of course you do, because they have robots that look like kittens and toilets that medically analyze your waste and shoot colorful fountains up your ass.

I think math and science at the professional level is super important. I think people should get wonderful, awesome education to be science professionals, and go on building tiny robots that can fly into your body and kill cancer like speck-sized mechanical ninjas. But this is the professional level, college, grad school, when you decide "I want to do this thing and I am going to study that thing". I'm talking about the main, standardized education that everybody is supposed to get, regardless of what you do later, and I think in the wider view of the population, teaching world history well is eminently more important than math and science.

You may ask why the hell knowing what a bunch of dead people did a frillion years ago makes any bit of difference. This is a good question. Some people will tell you that you need to learn history because history repeats itself, or that if we don't learn from our mistakes we are doomed to repeat them, or something to that effect. There is some merit to this idea, but not as much as people seem to think. Any given situation in a time and place cannot be the same as another situation, even in the same place or the same time; history generally cannot repeat itself because our circumstances constantly change and no situation is repeated. History really only repeats itself when you try to invade Russia in the wintertime, because Russia in the wintertime never changes: it's cold and it sucks. However, there are general patterns of history that repeat themselves, like when the economy goes bad, people get pissed off at the government, sometimes overthrowing it; when the government is disorganized and does not unify the country effectively, the country is fragmented; religion often takes the place of government or vice versa when one or the other does not fulfill peoples' needs; people often kill other people for money; people sometimes mutilate themselves to be fashionable, etc etc. It is possible to learn from these, and they are good to know. But people do not often learn from their own mistakes, let alone the mistakes of others, and it's not reasonable to expect us to not do things that people have already done that didn't work, because hey, it just might work this time, because history doesn't repeat itself.

People also sometimes say, "if you don't know where you're coming from, then you can't know where you're going." I don't put much stock in this either. I do believe it adds a richer quality to your sense of self when you know where you come from, and I think it's important in that sense; but I could do just fine not knowing I'm the product of Irish and English immigrants who shot leopards in Arizona and who originally lived naked in the woods worshiping pagan gods and then at some point became Christians because St. Patrick told them it was awesome and got killed by Romans and Vikings and God knows what else.

So I've gone and shot down the usual reasons; I could probably shoot down others if I cared to think of them, but I'll move on to telling you why I actually think history is important to people's lives. Simply put, it's because history is the study of humanity, in all the ways it has ever existed, and I believe that knowing the dimensions of humanity in all its forms gives a person a much deeper understanding and tolerance of human beings.

Modern society is deeply entrenched in a simultaneous explosion of communication and a shrinking of actual connection. Humans in this society are generally deprived, I think, of a whole sense of self and understanding in their role as a human being, and how they relate to others. A lot of people are extremely judgmental and opinionated, without ever considering that there might be more than one "right" way to live, more than one estimation of good or bad, without thinking that maybe such values are subjective. Though they might logically recognize different people as being the same species, they don't bother to consider them as fully human, on the same plane as themselves.  Some of us see differences in modes of living as ways that someone's humanity is less valid or unadulterated than ours.  Some of us see myopically, think only in terms of how our individual, localized worlds operate, without considering that what exists outside of our societies might be just as normally human.

A good study of world history--not just a course taken for a year, but continual reinforcement and expansion of knowledge--including philosophies, religions, practices, social norms, daily lives, huge developments, regime changes, art, music, sports and war, and God knows what else, poses a challenge to this way of thinking.  The student must slowly realize that their current society is just another way of living in the long line of millions of humans who came before; that beliefs are changing and subjective; that right and wrong are not absolutes; that people everywhere are different and the same.  Plastic surgery is not just a modern show of vanity, tattoos are not just a current way of subversion or stamping yourself as a slut; people were pulverizing and painting themselves to fit and transcend societal norms possibly before civilization, and certainly for thousands of years.  It may mean different things today, but our impulsion is still there; it is the same with sex, eating, thinking, socializing, and desiring.

Hopefully, by studying and familiarizing, the student comes to accept, appreciate, and admire.  The acceptance of multiple ways of approaching life is a huge step in creating the ability to tolerate and to think in a wider perspective, blowing open the brain's definitions of what is 'normal' or 'acceptable' and serving the person with a huge multitude of valid choices.  Once all of these thousands of examples of valid ways of living your life enter the mind as possibilities rather than wrong, stupid or irrelevant alterities, this also induces critical independent thinking.  If right and wrong ways of living do not exist, then everything is subjective, which forces the subject to impose their opinions and perceptions, which, in a well-informed setting, forces the analytical thinking.  The chains that bind us to our current society in our current place can, if we choose, be broken.  Our thinking does not have to be defined by what the present dictates, it can be defined by the possibilites of the past, which lead to the imaginings of the possibilities for the future.

The constellation of ways that people have lived is both fascinating and relevant.  Math may expand students' thinking on a theoretical plane, but history expands it on a very real plane, one that will have a significant effect on their social interactions and their way of viewing the world, and their way of conducting and viewing themselves.  What humanity has been and what humanity can be are part of the same study, and the possibilities of a human being, I believe, should be more important in public education than the theoretical possibilites of numbers that do not exist.