God I hate this kids videos with a burning passion. He literally is just continuously rephrasing the question of "Why do we learn these things in school but not these other things that I find important?" while missing the entire point of learning 'pointless' subjects in school. He has the education, but lacks the ability to analyze I suppose why that education is valuable? I have no idea, but it's pretty obvious why we learn a large range of topics in school that many people will often ignorantly call 'useless topics'.
First and foremost, if you think there's something you are learning or learned in school that you will NEVER, EVER, apply to life in any way shape or form, you're incorrect. The very fact you learned something means you retain it in some way, shape, or form. Most commonly I hear advanced mathematics courses are 'never going to be used', meanwhile they don't recognize what they're learning from them. Lets take a pretty basic 'advanced' math course most highschools/college degrees require you to take: Physics. What do you learn in physics that you think you will never apply? While it may be true that you will not use the algorithms, the numbers, the angles, the cos/sin/tan of degrees in everyday life, you are still learning something that retains with you for the rest of your life. When you look at a window washer platform on the side of the building, and you see one of the ropes snap, imagine your head what it looks like, you can can't you? You know which way the platform is going to swing, you know it's going to not just flop down and remain straight, you know it's going to swing because of momentum. You know that it's going to swing back the other direction, but not go as far because gravity + momentum slows it down so it never swings all the way back to its original position. You know how much force is behind it judging off of what it's made out of/whats on it, how fast it's swinging. All of these things you probably know and go "That's common sense" but try and explain it to a 5th grader. Hell, try and explain it to some kids that never took those classes or could even fathom them. You will have a hard time.
The reasons for this is simple, the classes so many kids and this guy see as useless information 'we will never use and are forced to learn' form the basic fundamentals of understanding how the world works. You don't have to memorize the algorithms or the math, but think of them as definitions of a brand new word you're learning in the dictionary of life. You may use words that you could precisely define in your everyday life, but you know what they mean and how to use them properly in a sentence. What you learn in school is the same.
History classes teach us what the mistakes the human beings of the past have learned from. Again, there's information you probably learned in history that you don't even recognize you learned but you apply to your everyday life. Most importantly is the quote mentioned previously in this thread, if you don't learn from the past you are doomed to repeat it. If you honestly think something hasn't been tried before, you fight valiantly to give it a try and don't handle being shot down very well, correct? What if you learned it had been tried before, and failed miserably, then you're more receptive to alternatives. History has thousands of years of people trying something and failing, and even if we are more technological advanced, there's fundamentals there that can be still learned from and adapted to work today. See Sun Tzu's Art of War as a perfect example, written in 5th century BC and still have viable strategic war tactics that are used even today.
The point is that school teaches fundamentals that you require to learn more information, and if you don't memorize the details, you understand the concepts and that's the important part that school is meant to teach you. The fact you are CAPABLE of learning something more advanced, means school did its job. If advanced learning was not mandatory for various subjects, I guarantee you there will be people completely unaware of how a pendulum works or why shadows aren't pitch black when they're 'blocking light'. The generations will be come more stupid the more we give them the freedom to do pointless things they prefer or learn something important. You don't have to enjoy learning, as long as you learn SOMETHING while you're in the class. If everyone expects everything to be easy and only learn what they want to learn, they will become one dimensional, boring, and people will fail to learn anything outside of their perfect bubble comfort zone. It's crippling to a race to allow TOO MUCH freedom when it comes to development (as we've seen with some of these ignorant mothers who refuse to put their kids in any kind of hard work environment and they become spoiled brats), if you want to advance, you have to learn from past mistakes and you have to be willing to learn something you may not enjoy, but know it's going to serve some benefit somewhere else in your life.
The chances are, this kid has all the tools to learn how to sign a voting ballot, and an understanding of the world to know what he'd like to see in it. That's thanks to the amount of world context and information that school "forced" into him. He maybe didn't enjoy it, but he's sure as hell benefiting from it.
