Balanced trees an essential data structure that we learn early in a computer science curriculum. To become a computer programmer, you would learn to maintain a set of keys and values, maintaining order and uniqueness, with O(log N) time complexity.
Balanced trees are both important in the practical sense and important in the pedagogical sense. You probably learned the Red-Black Tree.
How I remember it, there we were, a class of mainly second-semester computer science majors