At my age most of my new memories are spent storing habits such as if my keys aren’t in my pocket, they have to be in the entrance way table. If not, they’ve ceased to exist; at least in this universe. So if learning includes retention, I stopped learning a long time ago—I don’t even remember my own shoe size let alone my wife’s dress size. But looking back to the kind of learning we did in school I wonder if it’s really relevant to a productive life? When was the last time you drew upon that all that pithy knowledge you learned from Beowulf, Madame Bovary, or Pride and Prejudice? Thank heavens for Cliff Notes! Does anyone remember the last time you had to use a cotangent? There are lots of cells in my brain wasted on stuff like cotangents. And you can forget Euler’s law which explains the simple relationship between sine and cosine using e, transcendental and imaginary numbers? In case you forget: einx = cos nx + i sin nx. Finally how many times have you avoided repeating a mistake because you studied history? As Stephan Hawking said, “We spend a great deal of time studying history, which, let’s face it, is mostly the history of stupidity.”