I feel like the sass you had on that persons post was unnecessary. The one that references what high school does/doesn't teach. You can be snarky, half the time I am as well, but their point is still the same. Many H.S. don't educate you on real life skills/basic living. The majority of extensive knowledge in science and math are things most of us will never actually use in day to day adult life. Luckily, my high school taught those important life lessons. Unfortunately, not all schools do.

I probably was excessively sarcastic, but here’s the point I was making. The real-life skills they mentioned are good ones to have, but I literally explained pretty much everything you could know about them as a teenager in my sassy reblog. I think more high schools should have some form of a Home Economics class. That could be useful.

But let me speak in defense of high schools teaching math and science.

Yeah, you may graduate, get a job or college major in a non-scientific field, and never use biology, chemistry, physics, geometry, or calculus again. Then again, you might want to go into a STEM field. There are exciting things happening in science and engineering right now, and, in a country where most young adults are unemployed, these are fields that are actually growing. If you’re a high school sophomore, you probably don’t know yet what you want to pursue as a career. That’s fine. I didn’t work it out until much later than that. But if you want to apply to an engineering school, and your high school didn’t give you the science and math background the field requires, you won’t get in. You just won’t. I’ve seen it happen.

Of course, it’s quite possible that you won’t want to go into STEM fields, but your high school can’t design a four-year curriculum based entirely on life choices you haven’t made yet. Most people are expected to get a college degree. I think the American obsession with the B.A. is problematic on a bunch of levels, but that doesn’t mean a high school should ignore it. Recently, in upstate New York, there were valedictorians in public high schools who wanted to get degrees in New York’s state university system, and couldn’t gain admission to any of them, because their high schools hadn’t given them enough of an academic background. That their schools didn’t give them enough education to move forward with is an outrage.

The point of high school is to give you enough of a background in everything that you can proceed in anything. Now, I’ll freely admit that a lot of high schools don’t do this very well - they’re often underfunded (as was the case with those schools in New York), or poorly run. But, if your school is actually succeeding in teaching you higher math, and specific science, and comprehensive history, and English critical thinking, you can choose to use any of that knowledge, any of those skills, to go forward and specialize however you want.

And, if you choose not to use any of it, that’s fine too, but I guarantee that the knowledge won’t hurt you. Knowing things is cool, even if the things aren’t directly relevant to what you’re doing at any given moment - this xkcd sums it up elegantly. 

I’m not a scientist or mathematician myself, but I’d hate to have spent four years in high school and only have learned things I can look up on government websites and summarize in a paragraph.