"Should we try to help people who don't do well in traditional school environments? Definitely. But that doesn't mean we throw out traditional schooling"

Traditional schooling is the cause of the problems people have in school. Keeping it, but making special exceptions for people who are bright but failing, is like having a tow truck drag your car to work in the morning because you did not want to take it to a mechanic.

In an American school, the goal is to have all the students think the same way. We have laws that reinforce that goal at all levels of government. All students learn basic algebra and basic trigonometry. Very few learn Euclidean geometry, and almost none learn non-Euclidean geometry. A math teacher is not in any way free to decide their curriculum; the curriculum is given to the teacher, who forces it upon the students. A standardized test is given to all students at the end of the year, and it always has the same format, same subjects, and similar questions.

That is not a system meant to educate people or to promote their ability to think; it is a system meant to train people to be like everyone else. It is not just that we settled on that because we lacked alternatives. We chose this approach because the people in power did not consider teaching the population how to think to be a priority. If they had considered it to be a priority, standardized testing would have been rejected early on, if it had even been thought of in the first place.

"you have to test kids, otherwise you can't know if they're actually learning anything"

Giving everyone the exact same test, or variants of the same test with all questions being asked in the same way, does nothing to test their academic progress. Anyone can be trained to take a test when the format, subject matter, questions, etc. are all known in advance.

If you want to test people in a meaningful way, you need to give them problems they never encountered before, in formats they never encountered before. Otherwise you are just as likely to identify well-educated students as well-trained students, and you will lack any way to measure the difference.

"Taking literature in college when you're in a CS program is more than dumb"

Only if you think the purpose of college is vocational training. The idea that people go to college to receive job training and job credentials has been extremely destructive to higher education. It is not just that humanities departments are being slashed; in the CS department at my alma mater, computability and algorithms were the only theoretical courses. Compilers had been offered a few years before I arrived, complexity theory was not taught at all, and programming languages was just about different language features without any discussion of type theory. When I asked the department chair why the curriculum was so easy, the answer was that only a handful of CS students actually enjoyed learning CS, and that the department could not afford to have the other students leave as a result of rigorous standards. Those "other students" were only there for job credentials.

If you want vocation training, get a two year associates degree. That will save you time and money, and you will not be part of the wave of destruction that is ruining higher education.