And knowing which serves you what purpose? Sure it took a long time to learn, but at the same time, it was entire useless information to the 99.99% of the class who will not go on to be biochemists.
Everybody needs to learn to read, write, and do basic arithmetic. But the entire rest of your education is essentially just for the sake of getting you to think about stuff. The actual content being covered is largely an excuse, and certainly there’s no problem with including human knowledge in that. But at the moment we have a greater problem that most of our schooling years are largely wasted by teachers who would rather just test you on rote memorization of random information, and ignore all semblance of the ultimate goal, getting you to think.
And, for example, people will go to 2-4 year schools to learn how to program. A person with a few well-written books can learn all that same knowledge better in 2-4 months. A classroom is really a poor place to learn anything particularly useful. Someone who is truly interested in a particular category of knowledge can basically always find an introductory book that will cover more material in greater depth than he’d ever have gotten out of a classroom, and find any number of people online who can help him with any specific questions he might have.
If you can teach people how to teach themselves, you’re ultimately going to get people who can achieve more. They might come out of middle school knowing very little, but they’ll be prepared to suck in the material you present to them in high school and later in a much more self-aware fashion.
I view knowledge as a purpose itself, hence I see no need to justify knowledge by listing some additional purpose for it. That said, my understanding of genetics and protein synthesis has served many purposes. With it I can shoot down pseudo-scientific theories about the evolutionary origins of the human mind, approximate the odds of human immortality being achieved in my lifetime (very low), understand why radiation poses huge difficulties for interstellar travel, and much more.
Well, yes. That problem arises mainly because our politicians want to score points by imposing standards based on batteries of high-stakes tests. Consequently teachers to the logical thing and orient their classes around those tests.
In the big picture, however, if kids are to learn how to think, they have to practice thinking. A classical education consists of three stages: grammatical, logical, and rhetorical. In the grammatical stage, students are absorbing information. Call it rote memorization if you want, but it’s a necessary stage. It gives the students a launching pad from which they can move on to the logical stage, where they actually learn how to connect ideas to others.
I scored well on college placement tests and such, with the result that I did not take a single science course in college. Which was fine with me, because at the time I was primarily (exclusively?) interested in doing whatever came easiest to me, which definitely did not include science
Flash forward 30 years, and I look back on the majority of the social science classes I took as either bullshit, or material I could have picked up through independent study. I find the things that interest me the most tend to be hard science - primarily astrophysics, and biology. But within each of those areas there are clear boundaries at which I pull up short. When molecular biology starts getting too small (below the genetic level say), or astrophysics too big (was that billion billion or a billion trillion?), I find myself having serious difficulty grasping concepts beyond the somewhat general and superficial. I’ve been reading hard science for enjoyment the past 15 years or so, and find myself seriously limited in my ability to comprehend and retain much of it. And IMO&E that is a deficiency that cannot be corrected by surfing wikipedia.