> From kindergarten on, students spend thousands of hours studying subjects irrelevant to the modern labor market. Why do English classes focus on literature and poetry instead of business and technical writing?
uggggh this, this market-driven bullshit that assumes "business" should be the end goal of all human behavior
English classes focus on literature and poetry because maybe you should have some sense of beauty, because you should have some vague idea of what a good fucking sentence looks like instead of just learning to write the abominable circumlocutions of this year's dialect of Business English. Because maybe reading stories about people in interesting moral dilemmas can help us think about how we'd react in a similar situation and be able to say "hey wait I am starting to act like that asshole in that one book, it sure didn't end well for her, okay what else can I try then".
Because part of the job of education is to pass on a culture to the next generation along with raw knowledge.
> Why do advanced-math classes bother with proofs almost no student can follow? When will the typical student use history?
What's the old saw about people who don't learn history? They're doomed to repeat it? Do you really want kids making the same mistakes your parents made, because they didn't see any of the results? "Oh hey let's vote for this obvious confidence man for the lulz, what's the worst that could happen", one year later we have literal fucking Nazi groups rallying in the streets?
uuuggggghhh yes let's all just learn exactly what we need to learn to be useful to some big corporate entity, let's learn nothing that will make us ever question its inhuman, amoral, profit-first motives, I am sure this will have absolutely no problems whatsoever.