Every school teaches a mix of useful skills and filler, Bryan Caplan explains (in The Case Against Education), of “wheat” and “chaff”:
The crucial question is: What’s today’s mix? 90% wheat and 10% chaff? 50/ 50? 20/ 80?
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In a modern economy, literacy and numeracy are the only skills that almost all jobs require, so English and math make the cut.
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High school science classes…are only stepping-stones for the tiny share of students who pursue careers in science or engineering. How tiny? About one-third of high school graduates have a bachelor’s degree; only 14% of students who earn a bachelor’s degree major in science or engineering. That multiplies out to roughly 5%.
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To belabor the obvious, the arts are rarely useful. We don’t speak of “starving artists” for nothing.
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Foreign languages, similarly, are all but useless in the American economy. Thanks to immigration, employers have a built-in pool of native speakers of almost every living language.
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Almost every modern occupation uses some math. Yet high schools teach and often require math rarely used outside a classroom.
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Geometry is the most common of all math courses: over four-fifths complete it in high school. Yet the subject, featuring countless proofs of triangles’ congruence, is notoriously irrelevant. Geometry rarely pops up after the final exam, even in other math classes.
Algebra I, which teaches students graphing and one-and two-variable equations, has many practical applications. Most students, however, continue on to Algebra II, which largely exists to prepare students for calculus. Calculus, in turn, gets you into college. Once college begins, however, you’ll probably never differentiate another equation unless you pursue a degree in math, science, or engineering.
Knowledge of statistics, in contrast, is useful whether or not you go to college. Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman shows that statistical illiteracy underpins many foolish real-world choices. Yet only 7.7% of high school students pass a stats class.
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Being more relevant than Oxford in 1750 is nothing to brag about.
Geometry can be taught in many ways. Knowledge of proofs might be more useful than knowing the volume of a sphere.
A bigger problem is that school is intended to reinforce the social order. If schools taught students how to resist cops and lawyers, government would find maintaining power to be more difficult.
Another angle is skills versus facts. I probably don’t need to know the year in which Shakespeare wrote (a fact) but I certainly do benefit from understanding how Shakespeare could simultaneously persuade upper-class and lower-class people.
Regarding skills, many people need the skills of attention to detail and long-term preparation of projects. Building a ship in a bottle might teach more than the umpteenth celebration of Harriet Tubman. Building software without LLM assistance and debugging it by hand would probably be good preparation for lawyers.