You're spot on, it isn't. That's by design. The foremost goal of a modern education system is creating a labor force[1][2] that meets the projected demands of the economy. What is interesting to think about is that over time the type of workforce the economy needs changes and how that interacts with changes in education policy.
Don't get me wrong, there is value in trigonometry but I think classes on probability, statistics, and basic financial math like compound interest and so on are much more impactful when it comes to aggregate outcomes.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussian_education_system
A "How to ensure that you never get a door dash or eating out or only fans habit" class, and creating a culture that didn't promote expensive status symbols might save people more money than knowing how to budget properly...
What you're talking about becomes a very salient way to introduce the notion of compounding returns on savings.
Sometimes when you want to learn something new you dive in and try to hack something together. But when it’s sufficiently complicated or foreign you cant do that. You have to step back and study the underlying domain. That’s school. Its an incredible luxury to do that for 16 years of your life while producing nothing of value.
If you're not inclined to book learning or find yourself in a poor quality institution, an apprenticeship in a workplace/industry relevant to your interests could easily be a better fit.
So at around 13 I'd say that I was about the only one of my 30-ish classmates that was actually producing something that resembled working code. I coded a whole functional (but simple) sprite editor in QBASIC that could write PCX files.
But honestly, that code was complete crap. I was barely figuring out what functions were good for, because most of that was being self-taught by reading the manual and trial and error. And compared to my classmates that was top 1% stuff.
Nobody actually wants stuff like that for any serious purpose. No company wants that code, or being saddled with a few dozen teenagers, some of which are completely useless. And that goes for all fields. Who out there needs a human to do trigonometry these days? What about history, or literature? What does production there look like? Do we grade them based on likes and reviews on fanfiction.net?
This is an efficient summary of the social attitude I'm criticizing. People believe that children and teenagers are useless. They believe this because the structure of modern education requires young people to be useless. Every adult in their lives repeats variants of "you cannot and should not be trusted to do real work that other people need", and so young people grow up believing that.
If instead of resenting their presence and demanding that they be warehoused away in the name of efficiency, adults in contemporary society ought to look forward to training young people to be useful. If you take this attitude, and regard every young person as a future ally in your endeavors to maintain civilization to a high standard, it becomes clear that what's being done in most schools is inefficient, poorly-managed, and counterproductive.
Approximately no company wants to deal with an unskilled person. It takes a pro weeks to even start doing something useful in most organizations, let alone to be an useful addition to the team. If teenagers could be expected to produce useful code, then we'd have companies hiring new, unexperienced developers, but pretty much nobody wants to.
Now of course there are some really clever 12 year olds out there that can actually do cool things. But they're a very small proportion, and if you only deal with them then it's no longer education, but a mentorship for a select few.
"Nobody actually wants stuff like that for a serious purpose" is wrong and dismissive. Sometimes they actually do; sometimes they have a real but non-critical need of debatable seriousness, and software from a kid can fill it; sometimes the other person is a fellow 9 year old, what they want is an overly enthusiastic Harry Potter fanfiction where he meets Lightning McQueen, and both the author and reader are happy.
I don't think the suggestion was that students be employed or economically productive, just that they would be producing work to be proud of a lot more often in a better system.
I think most public schools tend to prioritize sports at the expense of most of those other activities.
In some cases, those sports involve gaining over 300lbs, which seems like it would largely counteract any benefits of the excercise.
Although it does seem like there's a certain number of people with some kind of major psychological need to prove themselves to themselves and have some kind of way to measure their progress and know they are gaining strength every day, and for them sports might be better than the self destructive lifestyle they sometimes do if they get consumed by feeling like they're "not enough".
That's certainly how it's set up today, but I find it difficult to believe that the most optimized, useful, and productive way to teach children about reality is the method we've settled on in the modern US. School could instead be designed around the production of art, goods, and services that are actually desired and used by people in and outside of the school. This would be a great deal more difficult to set up and maintain than a series of gradeable worksheets.
> Learning in school is about absorbing already existing knowledge.
Under the current model, is the knowledge really absorbed? Math class is great example. Most people struggle through algebra and trigonometry worksheets for a few hundred hours and then immediately dump the knowledge when they graduate and can't even name the three primary triangle side-ratios five years later. Was completing curated problem sets under threat of a worse career if they failed really the best use of their time? That can't be the best way to teach them.
> I spent a lot of time maintaining an internal inventory management app, which was eventually deprecated and now it's probably not used by anyone anywhere in the world, if not completely lost forever. Such is life. Still, I learned a lot from that.
Sure, but you were producing something of value. When you learned about an issue, you went hunting for the root cause because people were actually relying on you to do so, and when you fixed the issue you felt real satisfaction, and retained a desire to remember what you'd done. Also, you were paid.
I would wager a good deal of money that what you learned while managing the app stuck in your brain a lot more effectively than if the same activity had been taught to you in a class where you completed worksheets based on the inventory management platform.