Use

(My meeting with the students went on.)

“Em… There may not be any use to learn all these. But, who knows?” I murmured, “Let’s do it because the topic is interesting. Never mind what use we could make out of it in the future.”

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When the meeting was over, I began to think of the comment in a bit more detail. I must say the student is entirely correct. Nonetheless, I do not feel quite right. My first response is university is a place of teaching useless knowledge – otherwise we should call ourselves polytechnic. The word university comes from the Latin universitas magistrorum et scholarium, which means a community of teachers and scholars. To begin with, it was not meant for the teaching of useful and pragmatic knowledge.

But we do not have to be that idealistic. The reality is, if we only try to learn things that we are sure to be useful in the future, we would know very little – and we will find ourselves not well-equipped when an opportunity appears.