You just reminded me that I had to do this exact thing in a high school class.
In my seventh grade social studies class, everyone has to memorize the names and locations on a map of all 88 counties. I was one of the few who got it perfect. Then my parents had a chat with the teacher about why I was wasting my time with tasks like that. We were the last class that had to do it.
Well, I guess it was partially true. It was for states’s rights (to maintain slavery).
Thank you for posting this observation.
There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge.
Bertrand Russell
How many Raymond Chandler mysteries were solved when Humphrey Bogart said “but then I remembered something I read once…” How many scientific breakthroughs from oddball connections (I recall a nifty BBC series based on that)?
What is stupid are the lessons not for their own useless sake, or possible future applications, but just to beat kids into molds for only for drudgework, disposable jobs.
One learns so many things of little value or application that it might be hard to choose. However, since no one is likely to remember all of them, the first one to come to mind should work. It’s just talk. But if you want to compare one useless thing with another than be my guest. 
Hummmm. We called it a slide rule.
And yes, that’s what I came to post. Calculators were just becoming a thing, and were getting quite affordable. Our (old) math teacher poo-poo’ed them. They’d make us lazy. We MUST learn the intricacies of the slide rule. Spent many classes learning about the slide rule.
Within a year, calculators were cheap and every kid had one. Side rules (slipstick) were never to be seen again, except in museums.
I have a Sears catalogue from 1976 which proudly offers the forty-something function Hewlett-Packard calculator for the bargain price of $1000.
I had forgotten about reading in Middle English and square dancing. We did have an elderly teacher who made us walk around the school field for a few hours so she could criticize our posture.
Me too!
I think one of the goals of education is to expose young people to a broad number of subjects. I’ve found that I generally don’t need to diagram sentences, do quadratic equations, or explain the underlying causes of the witch-hunts in Scotland circa 1591 in my everyday life, the habits and skills I picked up to study new material are things I still use today.
Yes, indeed.
Or maybe in other words–Harry Chapin’s words–https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7qrbNygL0YU
The waste of human potential because of bad education is one of the epic tragedies of history.
In 7th grade our teacher had his wife come in and give us a lecture on the theories of Velikovsky
without any preamble or discussion that is was, shall we say, CRAP. I think she was serious.
As for “useless”, I leaned all about human reproduction in full detail, but I have never had a child of my own, nor delivered one. Not even babysat.
I suppose it doesn’t really count in this thread as useless, just horribly misrepresented to support the creation myth of the US. It wasn’t a revolution, it was the transfer (contested, to be sure) of economic power from one group of white men to another group of white men. Slavery would continue for almost another century, and genocide of indigenous people for longer than that. But that’s for a different thread.
So I will change my answer to square dancing. WTF was up with that?
I remember in fifth grade, our teacher had us create pros and cons about the candidates for the 1972 presidential election between Nixon and McGovern. She gave us all the pros about Nixon and all the cons about McGovern, and we didn’t know enough about politics to fill in the rest. It wasn’t till a few years later I realized she was trying to brainwash us into becoming young Republicans.
I never got the chance to return 2 years later and say “How about Nixon now, bitch?”
While writing in cursive may be pretty well obsolete, but it’s not the most useless skill to have. It’s definitely a more efficient writing method and comes in handy when providing a signature.
Ever see these millenials try to decipher cursive or attempt to sign their name on a form? That’s worth the price of admission right there!
For a long time, I thought that diagramming sentences had been a complete waste of time. But as I’ve read more and more stuff (especially stuff written on the internet), I realize that doing it gave me a good understanding of the structure of language, and of how to construct a coherent sentence. Those really are useful skills.
The more I read of sentences that lose track of what their subject is, that don’t even exhibit basic subject-verb agreement, or that consist only of a long introductory clause that does not actually have a predicate, the more grateful I am that I diagrammed all those sentences back in school.
I took tons of technical drawing courses in high school and college. All old-school using various hardness of pencils on a drafting board with a parallel rule and a triangle.
Much of our time was spent on practicing our lettering and learning how to draw neat tidy arrowheads on our dimension lines.
All of that has gone the way of the dodo.
But it is so ingrained in my brain that whenever I need to do a technical drawing I steer clear of the fancy CAD tools the cool kids use and I gravitate toward QCAD, a tool that feels so much like using pencil and paper: I use construction lines all over the place and I often use old-school drafting tricks such as using a 45-degree construction line to help project the horizontal construction lines of the top view down to vertical construction lines of the right-side view (only those who have done this will understand that sentence).
The Renaissance era of history. Boring shat! 
Vacuum tubes and how they work. Learned about them in basic and advanced electronics in high school then again in Navy A school. Worked on an old TV while in the Navy that had tubes, the problem was the tuner that did not rely on tubes. The other 4 years in the Navy and 40 years at the big airplane company I never worked on anything with a tube.
PE
Little or no time was spent actually teaching anything, like history, rules or strategy of games. Pretty much an expensive waste of facilities.
Same for me, in a way. It’s not that it was a waste of time, it was that I just didn’t understand it. I think that I wasn’t able to grasp that a word could be more than one thing. I knew what was a noun and what was a verb, and in my mind a word was either one or the other. So calling a word an object when I knew it was a noun just didn’t click. And when I wasn’t able to understand something that basic, any sort of sentence diagram was indecipherable to me. And looking back, it pisses me off that my teachers didn’t recognize this.
Yep. That and any math more advanced than basic algebra/geometry.