Why Study??

I’ve heard a lot of people, especially students, ask: why do I have to study calculus? Why do I have to prove that this identity is equal to this? When I go shopping, the clerk will not express my bill in terms of limits. And when I ride on an airplane it’s not necessary for me to compute the angle of depression or elevation nor do I need to compute the velocity of the plane. Eventually, we will forget about these things. So why study them when they will not help us in the future?
Justifiably, we can reason that these are not applicable to actual life. But believe me, it is.
Look at it this way, a baby will not need a diaper when he grows up but at the moment it is essential for him to have one. This is parallel to the necessity of studying calculus, genetics and the other “difficult subjects.” We may not be able to use these in the future but it is still necessary that we study them because they are prerequisites of the bachelor’s degree we want to earn. And a bachelor’s degree is important to find a job. And to find a job is important to sustain our life necessities and ad infinitum. Therefore, studying them is crucial to us.
I also hear people cursing the scientists for discovering, let’s say, the elements because if it wouldn’t be for them, we wouldn’t be memorizing voluminous atomic numbers, atomic weights and electronic configurations. Well, instead of cursing them, we should thank them and consider ourselves lucky because these scientists spent all their lives trying to know these properties, unlike us. We do not have to spend our whole lives just to know that hydrogen is the lightest element or to figure out that energy is equal to mass times the square of the speed of light. Before they have to travel around the world just to study different histories and culture unlike us because we can see the world with just one click. We can learn about China’s history through a book neatly compiled for us.
We must understand that the people we are cursing researched for the benefit of the human race, to make our life more comfortable and convenient. All they did benefits us now.
So, do you want the teenagers in of the 21st century to read in history books that the students in the year 2007 did nothing but curse the great scientists? I’m sure you don’t so grab your book, start studying seriously. In reality, the speed of your learning and understanding process is not dependent of the subject, it is dependent on how you try to understand and how eager you are to understand.