It's been a long time since I was in high school, but I've long thought that the American educational system should give up on teaching modern foreign languages badly and just mostly teach Latin, Greek, and Esperanto. If all you're going to do is make high schoolers take a year of foreign language in a classroom, they'd get a lot more from a year of Latin or Esperanto. Edit: The Klingon Duolingo course should be pret…
But these utilities really don't justify the classes and resources on their own... If we want high school to produce the greatest amount of utilons, we should be explicit about that, but then many many things will need to change. I believe English should be the world language, there's no practical reason to teach anything else at the expense of other more practical things to teach (like programming), especially in English speaking countries. If we want high school to more approximate what Universities used to represent, such as encouraging more Intellectualism (which I don't think is all that great, at least society-wide, from a utility perspective...), we should be explicit about that too, and again things will change. You might want to have students study French, Greek, Latin, Lojban, etc. for at least 2 years each because of Intellectualism -- but you may also want to balance that with more modern things like deeper computer science or math or physics, which won't help most people in their future lives either but can at least be fun and intellectually interesting for people who want their Intellectualism a certain way. Or we can try for a mix, but I'd propose that our current system is a mix, and other mixes will inevitably resemble the current system by being one-size-fits-all and not work too well. So if we want both, separate. Bring back trade schools and let young teenagers wholly uninterested in purely intellectual pursuits get to doing more interesting things like building a house or building JavaEE applications, and let the intellectuals do their thing without constantly having to waste time and energy rationalizing some vague utility and relevance to their proof-carrying code research.