Why should we study geometry?

At least at one level, the answer is quite surprisingly simple. Over most of the last
two and a half thousand years in the European or Western tradition, geometry has been
studied because it has been held to be the most exquisite, perfect, paradigmatic truth available
to us outside divine revelation. It is the surest, clearest way of thinking available to us.
Studying geometry reveals in some way the deepest true essence of the physical
world. And teaching geometry trains the mind in clear and rigorous thinking.
The amount of careful geometry and geometrical astronomy needed to build a place
like Stonehenge or the architecture of complex palace compounds in early Egypt, or China, or
the calendars of the Mayans and Aztecs, and so on through most other early societies, shows
that some quite detailed and precise practical knowledge of geometrical objects has been
widespread through most civilised human societies.
However, such practical if precise knowledge is hardly any kind of scientific study of
geometry in anything like the sense that we mean today. It is not apparently distinguished
from any other kind of knowledge, and makes no claim to any sort of special or unique
certainty: it is not epistemically differentiated, as we say in the trade. Put simply, it would
seem that these early societies had no concept of knowing about geometry in a way that is
different from knowing about physical things. Early civilisations may have had elaborate
practical knowledge of geometrical facts, it was some sort of practical calculating art, without
any notion that one could know about geometry in a different, special way. There wasnt
anything particularly special about geometry or knowledge of geometrical things. So, beyond
its utilitarian role, there was no particular or special reason to study geometry qua geometry.
Plato is the best known of Socrates pupils (as Aristotle is the greatest of Platos
pupils), and for Plato geometry is a convenient and particularly clear way of illustrating what
the dual nature of reality is like, and because the knowledge of geometry is so certain, a way
of giving us a feel for the kind of that is certainty is available to us when we gain knowledge
of the entities of his higher reality of Forms. What is really real and what is the object of
true, certain, and timeless knowledge is a non-physical state of being, one for which
geometry has privileged access. What we might call science in Platos world was to be
something that looked and behaved like geometry, in that it achieved something like
geometrys truth status.