True, but I also think that math teaches problem solving and logical thinking in a way that other classes simply do not. And I don’t think it’s reasonable to say that people don’t need algebra2. If I recall, just one of the topics covered is compound interest. Ask yourself, when was the last time you needed to think about an interest rate? And when was the last time you needed to think about a rhyme scheme in a poem? I’ve never heard anyone suggest that we don’t need to spend 4 years in high school doing literary analysis, but I’ve seen several people suggest that maybe we don’t need to complete 3 years of high school math. Perhaps if more Americans really understood how interest works we would not be having so many people making poor decisions about their long term finances.
This site is full of posts bemoaning how students (and often their parents) don’t appreciate the impact on their adult lives of taking on a large amount of debt to pay for college. How are they going to understand this better if we tell them it’s ok, they don’t need to understand compound interest? This is one of the few practical why-do-I-need-to-know-this things students learn in high school.