I largely agree, but I've always had this little bit of me that says "Most people do not need to know most sciences".
I mean, we don't teach circuit design to everybody, on the sensible principle that most people will never design a circuit. But we teach the anatomy of worms to everybody because... most people will eventually have a pressing need to dissect a worm? I mean, I'm not the world's most accomplished programmer by any stretch of the imagination, but I very rarely get asked by the bosses "Hey, Patrick, after you get done with that Javascript, could you please pull the heart out of the worm on my desk?"
I was also forced as a child to learn about some rocks floating around in the general vicinity of the sun. I still don't know why these rocks matter -- my best guess is that pre-modern civilizations thought they were gods, poets picked up on it, and people now consider the notion of travel to them sort of romantic. I'm at a loss as to how learning about rocks prepares one for programming, unless one aims to be one of the few hundred programmers engaged in writing software to control missions to space aimed at getting ever-more-detailed photos of the rocks "for scientific purposes".
Ditto lab chemistry. Titration is a) technician work -- its a repetitive process with about as much intellectual content as swapping hard drives which b) will be performed by perhaps half of a percent of the population in their lives, if that. Yet we make everyone do it. It makes about as much sense as making woodcarving mandatory for everyone... because you never know, right?
Because I'm certain that you wanted to be a programmer from the moment that you entered high school, and it never benefitted you to have even a vague idea of what other people do for a living?
I mean, we don't teach circuit design to everybody, on the sensible principle that most people will never design a circuit. But we teach the anatomy of worms to everybody because... most people will eventually have a pressing need to dissect a worm? I mean, I'm not the world's most accomplished programmer by any stretch of the imagination, but I very rarely get asked by the bosses "Hey, Patrick, after you get done with that Javascript, could you please pull the heart out of the worm on my desk?"
I was also forced as a child to learn about some rocks floating around in the general vicinity of the sun. I still don't know why these rocks matter -- my best guess is that pre-modern civilizations thought they were gods, poets picked up on it, and people now consider the notion of travel to them sort of romantic. I'm at a loss as to how learning about rocks prepares one for programming, unless one aims to be one of the few hundred programmers engaged in writing software to control missions to space aimed at getting ever-more-detailed photos of the rocks "for scientific purposes".
Ditto lab chemistry. Titration is a) technician work -- its a repetitive process with about as much intellectual content as swapping hard drives which b) will be performed by perhaps half of a percent of the population in their lives, if that. Yet we make everyone do it. It makes about as much sense as making woodcarving mandatory for everyone... because you never know, right?