"When will I ever use this?"

The question is a narrow one. It is a perfectly fitting question to ask of a vocational school preparing you to become a worker in a trade. But high school provides broad liberal education, not narrow vocational training. Liberal education, literally "the skills of freedom," empowers individuals with knowledge of the major endeavors of humanity, the disciplines of formal thinking, empirical investigation, informed judgment, practical decision-making, and appreciation of human ideals. Liberal education produces persons who are able to achieve in a vocation, to adapt as vocations change, and to develop new vocations as new needs arise. Liberal education produces free citizens who direct and reform the institutions of society to provide for the general good. It produces citizens who are capable a making democracy work.

A better question to ask is, "How will this make me a better human being?" The value of a worker in a trade is the product produced, and so the value of one worker is very much like the value of another. But the value of a human being is the breadth and depth of the individual in the whole of human affairs. Not every experience in high school can make you a better worker in a trade, but every experience in high school, no matter the subject, can make you a better human being — if you atune yourself to receive the improvement and to effect it within yourself.

A worker in a trade is dispensible when machines or cheaper labor come along to make the same product. But human beings with a liberal education, the "skills of freedom," will always be indispensible.  When the value of an endeavor has been exhausted, the workers are let go. But those individuals with the "skills of freedom" are retained and sought after, because they are the ones who are fundamentally innovative to find or create the next endeavor of value.

If you are able to leave high school with the abilities required to work at a trade, then you have received an adequate return on the time you invested. However, if that is all you leave high school with, you have left the far greater value behind. A liberal education, available to every young person at public expense in high school, is really an extraordinary opportunity, afforded only to the few wealthy in ages past. My advice is to shake yourself out of the notion that high school is something you have to endure in order to get a job. Instead of enduring it, take charge of your education and milk the high school experience for as much as you can, not just to become a worker at a trade, but to make yourself into a better human being. If you do, you will be valued far more than a worker in a trade throughout your life.