"how the world actually works" is a bit of a misleading statement. a deep understanding of various concepts can take years or decades to develop, and the understanding you get from 1-2 years of general education can lead you to make false assumptions and assume you know more than you actually do and as a result dismiss the opinions of people who are actually informed.
I don't believe that an extra year or two of education on thermodynamics or electricity would make the vast majority of the population better in their everyday lives, and it might make things slightly worse in terms of experts' ability to push things forward. Do we really want all our neighbors bikeshedding utility grid management like amateurs crowding into a github pull request? We've seen how good the general population is at epidemic management lately.
I was personally deprived of basically any education until community college due to how education and parental "freedom" work in the US, and while the gaps in my education (STEM in particular) are regrettable, in practice they really have not interfered in my everyday life. I enjoyed learning about biology, physics etc and do some reading on my own time to this day but the stuff that I actually need to know about in my everyday life tends to be from the 'soft sciences' or non-sciences, like history or economics - despite the fact that I've been working as a programmer for over a decade.
youre correct that it may not be enough time, but it gives them a foothold they can use later in life where the subjects might otherwise appear impregnable.
> Do we really want all our neighbors bikeshedding utility grid management
we already teach these subjects and i dont see this happening. I actually feel like bikeshedding would happen more if people only self educated on these topics, theyd have no baseline to compare to and anything they learned would "separate them from the pack" so to speak.
Your answer is "to deter to expert opinion" which already happens with our current system, except by not teaching it in schools we discourage people from learning it unless self taught. Which i think is a bad idea.
I don't believe that an extra year or two of education on thermodynamics or electricity would make the vast majority of the population better in their everyday lives, and it might make things slightly worse in terms of experts' ability to push things forward. Do we really want all our neighbors bikeshedding utility grid management like amateurs crowding into a github pull request? We've seen how good the general population is at epidemic management lately.
I was personally deprived of basically any education until community college due to how education and parental "freedom" work in the US, and while the gaps in my education (STEM in particular) are regrettable, in practice they really have not interfered in my everyday life. I enjoyed learning about biology, physics etc and do some reading on my own time to this day but the stuff that I actually need to know about in my everyday life tends to be from the 'soft sciences' or non-sciences, like history or economics - despite the fact that I've been working as a programmer for over a decade.
Math is essential, though, no question there.