>the goal is still to provide as much background as possible Sure, we can say that as an ideal but we still have to convert the "as much background as possibl

>the goal is still to provide as much background as possible Sure, we can say that as an ideal but we still have to convert the "as much background as possible" into an actionable concrete curriculum. The issue is a finite amount of time to teach a list of topics and the bias in 99% of recommendations is to always say "kids should be taught X" but we never frame it in the opposite way to reveal the inherent tradeoffs : "kids should be denied being taught Y so that time is used to teach X": In other words, any recommendation that kids "must learn topic X" means we're silently omitting Y. It's an inherent optimization problem of what to do with limited time window in classrooms. That's why some college Calculus professors recommend switching out Calc I for a Statistics/LinearAlgebra. They're not saying calculus is unimportant. Instead, they're treating it as optimizing the best bang-for-the-buck math topics for 17-year olds. We can do a lot of radical thinking regarding optimization of high school curriculums. E.g. I've always thought that a semester of dissecting advertisements in newspapers and tv commercials and how they manipulate you would be an excellent class for teenagers. But devoting time to that comes at the expense of something else. Therefore, I'd recommend substituting Shakespeare's plays Romeo & Juliet and Julius Caesar with "Media Manipulation Studies" but of course, some people would complain "how can you possibly understand Western Civilization and humanities without studying Shakespeare?!?". Maybe true but making kids study Shakespeare also means we're denying them <Other_Really_Important_Topics> because there's always a constraint of finite time.