Indeed, that is different and not clear in “trade school vs. real education.” I wonder to what extent OP’s feeling that these other topics are useless is due to the specific courses. I find the concept of studying history to be quite important, but I find the majority of history classes to be boring, uninteresting, and a waste of my time. Similarly the study of literature is important, but I doubt the specific lit course OP was taking is that important. In high school, I didn’t have the flexibility I did in college and so I thought I hated history and english but in fact, I just hated those specific history and english courses. If OP has little flexibility in his college courses, he may not have come to that realization that it’s the specific courses themselves that are useless, not what the courses represent.
College represents a small subset of your lifelong learning. I’m glad I got to take advantage of that environment to really learn what I wanted to learn most and by focusing on the topics that interested me most, I learned the skills so that when I need to understand something that I didn’t encounter in college, I can do so. Those skills can be taught in a wide variety of contexts though (which of course is why most schools use gen eds and not core curricula). The limiting reagent in your college course selection should be the number of courses you are able to take not the number of interesting classes offered at your school, and every course you do take comes at the expense of not being able to take something else. The person best suited to decide which courses are best for you and your goals is you.
While gen eds are certainly better than a true core, they are still problematic at many schools where only certain classes count or there are caps on the number of classes you can take in a single department.
I was an ScB double major at Brown, and 28/32 courses were spent satisfying my two concentrations. Very, very few other schools would have allowed me to do what I did because they would say my education wasn’t “broad enough.” I was very judicious in choosing which schools I applied to. I didn’t apply to any school without an in depth look at its course catalog. I would argue that my ScB Biology and Classical Studies double major gave me a very broad education, encompassing biology, chemistry, physics, mathematics, sociology, anthropology, history, visual arts, religious studies, foreign languages, literature, theater, military science, and architecture. That’s arguably 14 different disciplines but on my transcript it’s only 5 departments, only one of which isn’t STEM. One of the other regulars on the Brown forum mentioned how he took classes from a much larger variety of departments and many non major courses, but in his opinion, his course of study was no broader than mine because all those “extra” classes actually tied heavily back to his main course of study (unintentionally done by him at the time). The problem is most people would look at our two transcripts and say that my education was too focused and his was far more diverse.