I’ll admit I’m biased on this issue, but I’m very wary of this type of reasoning. There are plenty of courses that are more useful than calculus, but kids/young

I’ll admit I’m biased on this issue, but I’m very wary of this type of reasoning. There are plenty of courses that are more useful than calculus, but kids/young adults won’t be convinced to learn a subject purely out of its utility in adult life (same reason I’m against replacing math with a “life skills” class); in g TV fact Calculus was the course that changed my whole college and career trajectory. Up until I took Calculus, I recognized the importance of math, but hated every dull second of it - there was no motivation that appealed to me, and it seemed that math could only be used to solve the most contrived problems (word problems that resulted in linear systems, simple roots of trig or polynomial functions, etc). The only reason I took calculus is because it was the next math course after pre-calc and I still had a year left in high school. I didn’t even realize that there was a type of math that could be used to exactly calculate quantities related to continuously changing processes, but I was absolutely fascinated by how many real world problems calculus could solve - I realized that the problems given in algebra were contrived out of necessity to resolve in a neat manner. Now I had access to an entirely new vocabulary that allowed me to describe the world as it is, not as it needed to be to neatly fit in a 10th grade word problem. Until that point I was interested in psychology (and had a vague notion that I’d drop out of school to make a career in music somehow), but I immediately dropped everything to take as many math and physics courses as I could. 14 years later and I work in a very math heavy engineering oriented field. I know my story is probably atypical, and I have no clue what I’d be doing right now if I hadn’t taken calculus, but it’s one of those things that I look at in hindsight and think that I was that close to giving up on STEM, but for being forced to take Calculus. Instead, I earned my Ph.D. in applied math, and there’s not a day where I don’t use calculus of some kind.