elasto wrote:but it seems to me that something like calculus is a more appropriate skill to be taught at degree level rather than in high school - ie. once it's known it will be directly useful to your career.
I'd way prefer that high school focus on real-life useful skills like, I dunno, the power of compound interest to make you rich or poor, or how to fact-check political arguments.
And most people will never use the things they learn in Earth Science/Geology, Chemistry, Biology, etc, and arguably less often than Calculus. Might as well extend that to History, English (sadly), Music, Art, and so on. But we still teach those things, because at 14 years old people don't know what they want to do, and should be given a basic education in a wide variety of subjects just in case.
And if I was dictator of Earth, I'd ship all the useless office drones into space, but only after I have one engineer develop a self-sanitizing phone.