[wavemode]

It's about practicing how to read and write. Skills that you'll benefit from in every form of knowledge work that you'll ever do.

I would cut almost every other class from the curriculum before cutting English.

[malnourish]

It's also about how to reason about and understand what you're consuming, how to analyze sources, how media affects you; my wife is an English teacher and the comments here are often completely missing what's truly going on in a school.

Explains a lot, actually.