It's fashionable to dismiss the humanities today, but we're not talking about Latin here. Speaking Spanish or Mandarin or Hindi is tremendously practical and opens up a wider range of opportunity than learning to code. CS is great, but it's not for everyone, even those who do pursue CS can benefit from being able to communicate with more people.
I passed high school Spanish through the third year at a top-50 California public school. Later when visiting Argentina people found my speech near-incomprehensible, and I could barely get the gist of a typical newspaper story. That was a couple decades later and it's not nothing, but it was nowhere near worth the time it took.
If you're genuinely motivated to learn a language you can do a much better job (and I did, with French as an adult; yes, the Spanish long ago did accelerate that a bit).
You're correct, but the same thing can be said about any grade school subject.
Grade school and a lot of undergraduate work are often about breadth, and you'll never know where your interests lie and how you'll want to apply your knowledge to a career until you have some exposure.
Inevitably, some percentage of people taking math in high school will become engineers, mathematicians, or scientists. Some percentage of people taking English or Social Studies will become project managers, politicians, marketing professionals, etc. Some percentage of foreign language students will do business with a foreign country or otherwise continue their studies. And some percentage of computer science students will become programmers. Some percentage of students taking band, orchestra, choir, or drama club will pursue creative fields. Some percentage of shop and woodworking class students will become tradespeople.
But not every student in every one of those classes will become all of those things.
It doesn't mean that students taking these courses are wasting their time in any way. In an alternate reality you could have fallen in love with Spanish and studied it more rigorously, and you'd have used that knowledge to advance your career. But it didn't really benefit you, and that's okay.
I agree with almost all of that -- but it's not okay to waste people's time with lots of required classes. Compulsory schooling has some benefit, mostly in the basic three R's, outweighed by the costs the further you get from that core. (Among the costs are making a lot of people reflexively hate/disdain subjects they might've liked by coming to them more naturally in their own time. In this case I didn't hate Spanish, it wasn't worse than average for school, but that's saying little.)
It is somewhat practical if there is no opportunity cost, but there is an opportunity cost. Four years of a normal class is nothing. If you devote 4 hours per day for a decade, sure... but that is a lot of time that could be better used for so many other things.
Then, OK, so you learned Mandarin but it turns out you need Hindi. Oops. All that time was wasted because you incorrectly guessed which language (of hundreds) might be useful many years later. Not that it matters of course, because by then you've forgotten the language you learned anyway.
