What's the point of schooling? real life?’ The reason we hate this question is, of course, that we teach many things in school that do not have a practical purpose for most people. You don’t analyse the themes of Macbeth or learn calculus because you’re necessarily going to use them when you leave school. You learn these things because someone, somewhere, has decided that education has an inherent value, and that learning these things will enrich your life. Whether they do enrich your life, well, is a different question. (I do quote Shakespeare almost daily, but I acknowledge I’m probably an outlier.)