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Because a broad educational background is important and people can't know if they'd be into old literature without being exposed to it.
I guess, but broad exposure goes on for a very long and boring time, imho. Couldn't there just be a 1 semester broad exposure class to find out such things instead of years of painful obtuse prose students mostly just pretended to read?
No, that wouldn't actually provide a baseline understanding of a variety of topics. Things like media literacy can only be taught by reading and watching and analyzing a wide range of things, and that takes several years of just one general thing. Basic biology, enough to understand fundamental things like how/why vaccines work or the importance of diet and exercise also builds on many years of learning. Math should be confidently understood at least through algebra in order navigate taxes, bills, budgeting, and other legally important but boring situations.
A lot of stuff doesn't feel important while you're learning about it and partially that's just teachers doing a bad job contextualizing the lessons but yes many topics just aren't intrinsically interesting to everybody. It's still good to have a robust base of understanding because that makes tangentially related things easier to parse.
And that's not even getting into "electives" that would be super useful for most people if they had the time, things like cooking and shop class so folks are more self-reliant, or music or art or crafting because hobbies can also be menaly stimulating and fulfilling, or better or more varied PE types because it's also important to develop some decent health habits early in life. In a perfect world a lot of that would be introduced or reinforced at home by family and friends and neighbors, but that's not the world we have.
It's not a terrible point, but media literacy seems to be quite low no matter what and lessons are easily forgotten. Teaching scientific literacy through ecology courses would have a better impact.
Pretending to read instead of engaging with the lesson is going to do that, yeah.
Ecology is my favorite, and the focus of my secondary education, but it can't come before chemistry and biology and those build on algebraic math and require and understanding of science built from "general science". Should probably also have some statistics. Geology and cartography are going to be in there, as well as the history of conservation, there should be some anthropology... It's all very iterative. Ecology specifically encompasses a ton of disciplines.
I'll add that introductory stuff can happen early. In my state we learn about the salmon life cycle in grade school and that includes a tiny bit about watersheds and streams and clean water. But it's very rudimentary.
So many people don't understand climate science. It's unfortunate these topics couldn't be integrated into a.climate science class. It may be too late anyway to change the impending global destruction trajectory.