Here's the thing though: I do feel that it is beneficial for everyone to get a taught the fundamentals of all of these subjects because:
- It helps you better understand the world around you.
- A lot of knowledge can (and often should) be applied outside of their obvious areas
- It helps us appreciate and/or understand other people in jobs very different from our own
- It helps young people decide what they enjoy or are good at
- It provides a base that can be expanded on in the future if the person ever needs or wants to
- It helps us communicate between disciplines as
- Probably more that I can't think of offhand
"and subsequently forget it"
Sure. This happens a lot, but you forget a different subset of what you learned than what I forget. I also find I can relearn things that I learned in school a lot easier than I learn completely new things. I also wouldn't have known what to forget and what to spend time remembering and improving if I hadn't learnt it in the first place. Finally, I found out that I either enjoyed some of these things that I otherwise never would have been exposed to, nevermind how much of these things seemed useless at the time (and so I would have opted not to learn them, given a choice) but have since turned out to be extremely useful or even critical.
Note that I am not arguing that the education system isn't broken (I think it is), but that learning a large variety of subjects isn't necessarily bad or even a symptom of the broken education system. I think that any reasonably education system would expose students to a large variety of subjects before focusing on specifics.
- It helps you better understand the world around you.
- A lot of knowledge can (and often should) be applied outside of their obvious areas
- It helps us appreciate and/or understand other people in jobs very different from our own
- It helps young people decide what they enjoy or are good at
- It provides a base that can be expanded on in the future if the person ever needs or wants to
- It helps us communicate between disciplines as
- Probably more that I can't think of offhand
"and subsequently forget it"
Sure. This happens a lot, but you forget a different subset of what you learned than what I forget. I also find I can relearn things that I learned in school a lot easier than I learn completely new things. I also wouldn't have known what to forget and what to spend time remembering and improving if I hadn't learnt it in the first place. Finally, I found out that I either enjoyed some of these things that I otherwise never would have been exposed to, nevermind how much of these things seemed useless at the time (and so I would have opted not to learn them, given a choice) but have since turned out to be extremely useful or even critical.
Note that I am not arguing that the education system isn't broken (I think it is), but that learning a large variety of subjects isn't necessarily bad or even a symptom of the broken education system. I think that any reasonably education system would expose students to a large variety of subjects before focusing on specifics.