High School Curriculum Should Be Changed

High school has a wide range of purposes, I will try to list some :- Preparing for post secondary education- Preparing to enter labor market- Preparing to survive in everyday life ?- Social interactionsA distinction has to be made between "general education" and "professional education". I do not know the system works in the US but:In most continental Europe, if you want to be a mechanic (for example), you can choose when you are about 16 and completed lower secondary education to attend a professional school. You will then have much less math or history and instead focus on really useful stuff for you like welding etc... I do believe that there should be a differentiation in education. We should not impose the same educational program to everybody regardless of their future orientation. Allowing people to specialize earlier in what they want to do could be a great solution (However, This would be another debate).Let's go back to the topic. You are basically saying that you are uncomfortable with the fact that: Some subjects you perceive as being useful are not mandatory (accounting for example) while some subjects you perceive as being useless are mandatory. One can subscribe or not with your perception of usefulness but it remains more about opinion than real argument."(Furthermore, do you really believe that a teenager is going to WILLINGLY take a financing class, or a politics class?)"There is no evidence teenagers would not take such classes. In fact many teenagers are interested in politics or in opening their own business in the future. However there is no reason why these subjects should be mandatory for everybody. But then why Math has to be mandatory for everyone and not Accounting? This leads us to the question : Why some subjects are optional and other mandatory ?Subjects such as Math, Science or History are basic subjects and are important prerequisites for more advanced classes which ultimately are useful in everyday life. Example: Accounting is based on Maths. http://www.newyouth.ca...I could argue that basic anatomy (or ecology, psychology) has to be mandatory for everyone in high school because everybody has a human body... everyone must learn about the environment etc....You cannot go that way ! There are hundreds of subject one could consider useful, you could not prove politics is more important than human anatomy or art.... Specialization in any advanced subject should always be optional while basic subjects have to be mandatory.About gym class (this is different from other subjects)The main reason why PE is mandatory because physical exercise is good for health (this is obvious and proved by many scientific studies). What can be controversial about PE (or gym) is its content: Some may argue that including team sports in PE is useless. PE can also be very harmful for health because of bad teaching (but you have the same chances of having a bad math teacher and learn nothing about Maths , so this is not a specifically PE related issue) http://www.slate.com... I myself, used to suck at team sports like soccer or basketball because I couldn't"t care less while performed well in individual sports. Do I agree with this idea that PE should be only about individual sports? No I don"t. Life is about compromise. Education is about compromise. A balanced mix of individual and team sport is a fair solution (Sometimes fair solutions do not please anybody... and can be viewed a bit like Solomon splitting the baby). The mandatory nature of PE is only reinforced by the fact that there are strong forces in society pushing towards unhealthy lifestyles (such as fast food etc").******************************************************************************My conclusion is that there is no reason to systematically replace subjects like Art or IT for basic accounting or politics as mandatory subjects. One should be free to choose. What You said while commenting keyboarding can be also applied to politics or accounting "I will agree that the class is helpful and convenient, however I will reiterate that it is not needed."Schools programs are created by experts and are constantly evolving to meet society's demands. Are school programs lagging behind ? Probably yes... but this does not mean they should be impulsively reformed based only on arbitrary claims.