I definitely agree that learning things that seem irrelevant to your job pipeline can be good, just like your K-maps example. But I also think there are plenty

I definitely agree that learning things that seem irrelevant to your job pipeline can be good, just like your K-maps example. But I also think there are plenty of seemingly irrelevant things that end up not helping you at all, ever. That's why I don't think teachers ought to be in charge of teaching those extra things like K-maps, but rather, students should be asked to study things on their own (both inside and outside their comfort zone), in hopes that students will "learn to learn" and be able to teach themselves. You're right, this method would not have given you K-maps in school, but it also would have wasted less of your time in school, and empowered you to learn about things on your own (such as don't cares in K-maps, or even just the general idea that you can assign whatever value you like to outputs you never expect to see).