I see what you’re getting at, and you’re not wrong to think about how the lessons we teach kids from the minds and skills we want them to have. There’s positives and negatives to the liberal arts education, and it could be said that it is just as much of what is left out then what is kept in. The choice to teach about mitochondria and not the Krebs Cycle is odd from a scientific perspective, but if you know about endosymbiosis then it’s a lot harder to accept that all organisms appeared independently a few millennia ago. But once you view a liberal arts education from this perspective then you see these biases everywhere. For example, how many world history classes talk about the Tamil Kings, or the Warring States period of China? It’s a lot easier to other a region you don’t know the history of.
So we have to ask, what purpose should education serve? What knowledge and skills should we expect people to have by the time they reach adulthood? Add what is the best way to disseminate those?
I never get this argument about taxes and car tires. Did your school not have a civics class or an auto shop class? And if not, did you never learn to read the manual? That’s all stuff you can learn in 15 minutes, not need a semester of highschool to learn. Like, you can argue againt cell bio being in the curriculum, but if you want to argue there needs to be a class to read instructions that are included then maybe it’s basic literacy you’re arguing for basic literacy instead.