“The most important thing we learn at school is the fact that the most important things can't be learned at school.” - Murakami Haruki

There are a lot of good quotes along these lines. My favorites:

"I never let my schooling get in the way of my education." (Mark Twain)

"Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn." (Ben Franklin)

Most of these people seem to be concerned about some sort of pedagogy rather than school in general, though. They largely dislike the way that schools treat students as fungible cogs.

Formal education is more valuable the more that students are involved in the teaching process. Lockhart's Lament is a classic piece on that topic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Mathematician's_Lament

The thing is that it also depends a LOT of how your life turns out later, which is hard to predict.

I did Latin because my dad didn't and regretted it immensely when he took up Pharmacy, since he felt he would have had an easier time learning latin names. It's both arguably wrong (it's not because you can translate Cicero that you can remember plant names) and very narrow. It however served me immensely in vocabulary parsing, both in French, my native language, and English, heavily influenced by it.

You mention interesting gaps, like nutrition or fitness, finance and general life knowledge, which I felt I lacked too. I had to suffer through a lot of these when emigrating to Asia but I survived. I suppose I'd be like my dad and force my kid now to learn how to setup life in a new country completely alone if it was a school subject :D But my kid could decide to become a local farmer and write on FarmerNews how useless it all was and how he wishes there were more classes about agricultural science.

The way I see it is that education is also a way to create well-rounded citizens able to take semi-coherent decisions at the voting booth (so Geography and History, Philosophy and Literature are useful here), a long and hard problem we've had for centuries. Beyond that, we have had a big debate in France since forever between school being "education" or "instruction": shouldn't parents be put on the hook for their children's survival rather than our taxes paying for everyone's ability to compete equally ? Do we educate children to the point we teach them to wipe their asses and eat properly, or do we "instruct" them solely on theoretical and moral subjects, leaving the base survival skill to the family ? School, many say in France, shouldn't shoulder all responsibilities in a person's "education".

In Asia, or let's say China since that's where I am, education is very mechanical and a pure transfer of practical knowledge in a narrow set of easy subject like Physics or Maths, or Chinese. There is no hint (or it's being discussed to remove them in some places) of opinion building, critical thinking, history-as-a-science or things like that. They would do fitness or eating classes if they realize it's becoming a problem, in a way that would probably serve kids. But, end of the day, they see humans as cattle and as every farmer, like their cattle so long as they do what they're designed to do. No way they read Cicero, ever :)

Nothing one learns in school is wasted, ever. It colours our thinking in ways we do not fully appreciate until much later.

There is an opportunity cost to everything.

The best anti-poverty program the US could do is teach kids basic accounting and finance in the public schools as core curriculum.

the old programs mostly told you how to balance a checkbook. I can't imagine what a program would be like now, where they need to invest in stocks, manage a 401 k, consistently put a fraction of all earnings into something, and understand increasingly arcane financial products.

Sort of like teaching computers, from HTML and CSS to Github and all the related technologies. I think people don't realize how complex modern life has gotten in such a short time

It would need to cover:

1. time value of money (exponential interest)

2. the basics of double entry accounting

3. what stocks are and how they work

4. what bonds are an how they work

5. how loans work

6. how a business makes a profit

7. what "float" is

Arcana is not necessary, just the basic stuff. Ignorance, and even worse, misconceptions, form a large barrier to people wanting to move up in the world.

It's crazy that otherwise well informed adults are unable to distinguish "revenue" from "profit". Heck, I learned this when I was 10 and started buying and selling comics. I bragged to my dad how much I "made" from the sales. He laughed and punctured my balloon by pointing out how much I'd paid for the books.

I paid this forward years later when a friend was so pleased he'd "won" $250 with a lottery ticket. I asked him how much he'd spent on losing tickets, and his face fell. That was the end of lottery investing for him.

That's not an inconsequential amount to learn, especially teaching someone how stocks work in terms of buying or valuing them, or how to evaluate a business working or not working. I think it gets pushed up into college level courses, honestly; I don't know the best way to teach these subjects to the average 14 year old.

You can break it down to the proverbial lemonade stand. Set one up and let the kids run it. Or when the kids run a bake sale to raise money for the dance - there's a good opportunity to impart this information.

Using real money will pique their interest.

Probably the best episode of "The Apprentice" was the very first, where the teams had to each set up and run a lemonade stand for a day.

In my area, we had home economics which was supposed to teach you how to cook, what to eat, how to do your taxes, etc. It was removed from high schools because it was not helpful to find a job, or useful to college applicants.

> or useful to college applicants

This. So many things was skipped and glanced over in school, because it won't be on final exam, so you don't have to know it. This constant focus on exams and numeric results is driving the education system into the ground.