[strayptr]

unless I'm pursuing engineering or some computation-heavy career, when will I need to care about calculus? Or for that matter, why ever learn about cell biology in elementary school? Not everyone is going to be a geneticist, and most pharma patents are completely off limits, so why bother?

Agreed. Why bother? In fact, forcing children to learn these topics often harms them so irreparably that they not only don't retain the knowledge, but can't bring themselves to be interested later in life.

Make it optional. Make the topics available for children who want to know. Make it self-selected, just like every other aspect in life.

[nitrogen]

The point of compulsory education is to provide a common memetic foundation for society's interaction and communication.

Without that shared foundation, we see endlessly polarized political talking heads debating nonissues for attention instead of reasoned debate and informed participation in society.

[mindcrime]

The point of compulsory education is to provide a common memetic foundation for society's interaction and communication.

That's the charitable view. Another view is that the point of compulsory education is to create generation after generation of children who have had any sense of independence, creativity, initiative or inclination towards free thinking, beaten out of them - generations of children who don't question authority and make good, unquestioning worker drones.

I'm not saying one view is right or the other is wrong, but let's not be too quick to accept the presumed virtues of compulsory education without looking at the dark side.

Without that shared foundation, we see endlessly polarized political talking heads debating nonissues for attention instead of reasoned debate and informed participation in society.

Sadly, we appear to have those things already, even though we have (in the US) a fairly extensive public education system, and compulsory education through age 16 / 17 or so (I suppose that varies by state?) and - nominally - higher literacy rates than in decades past. Although on that last point, I think there's a bit of an open question. Measuring literacy is apparently something that wasn't a priority, say, 200 years ago, and detailed, verifiable statistics are hard to come by. But I've seen some commentary to the effect that the US had better literacy rates in centuries past, than we have now.

I'd actually like to know more about that, but it's a pretty politically charged issue and it isn't necessarily easy to find good info.

[strayptr]

I'm not sure if the elites of HN have spent much time among today's average youth, but they certainly aren't learning a common memetic foundation. They barely graduate from high school. And in fact, the average youth are what drag down today's achievers. The achievers are made to feel there's something wrong with them, and that it's a sin against the collective to try to be better than average.

Yet averages are precisely the problem. You throw your achievers together with the average, giving them nowhere to go and no outlets to explore. Programming is one of the few outlets, as it isn't compulsory, yet here we're talking about ripping that one away too.

I figured out what the original comment reminded me of:

https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/LockhartsLament....

"We are helping our students become more competitive in an increasingly sound-filled world."

[mindcrime]

I'm not sure if the elites of HN have spent much time among today's average youth, but they certainly aren't learning a common memetic foundation. They barely graduate from high school. And in fact, the average youth are what drag down today's achievers. The achievers are made to feel there's something wrong with them, and that it's a sin against the collective to try to be better than average.

FWIW, I graduated high-school in 1991, which is probably before some posters here were born. And everything you just said was true in 1991 as well. I have a hunch it was true quite some time before that as well.

[danharaj]

I think you're wrong, if only because compulsory education exists and politics is dominated by polarized political talking heads. I think your explanation is very optimistic. My explanation might sound cynical, but compulsory education in some part is clearly intended to mold children into parts that fit well into the economic machine, and another part is inculcating them into the civil religion of the nation.