My sister was doing her math homework and, whilst doing so, rhetorically asked me why she needs to know advanced algebra and other mathematics absolutely no one who isn't a scientist needs to know in their regular life. "I know why you might need to know it in college," she said, "but I'm not even in high school yet. What's the deal with that?"
It was in that moment that I realized it was because of college that you need to know that. The point of college, or so it's been explained to me, is so you can get a degree. It's not necessarily important what you get the degree in, it was further explained to me, so long as you can prove to a potential employer that your skills include doing things you don't like and doing them reasonably well, which is proven in the fact that you've completed your general education. General education entails learning quite a bit of stuff that is neither relevant to your interests nor relevant to life in general. Yet you learn it, you do it, and you pass classes, which allows you to go on to pass classes in things that are relevant to your interests and/or relevant to your life, which is how you get your degree.
You need to learn stuff like that in high school and even before so you can learn it more easily once you get to college. They have to learn stupidly irrelevant and complex things during your compulsory education so you can learn more stupidly irrelevant and complex things during your higher education. The ultimate reason is so you can prove to employers that you can do stupidly irrelevant and complex things, which is exactly the sort of thing they want to know you can do.
I figured it out. I figured out why they make you learn how to find X in big long equations when you're a kid in school. It's still kind of dumb and not the best system, but at least there's a bit of a reason. Mystery solved.
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