This is pretty much off-topic. I'll loosely tie it to my teaching and riding by saying that I've had teenage students ask me this question: What classes am I taking in high school that will actually apply to my adult life? Or, stated another way, will I ever use any of this stuff again?
Here is my totally non-scientific, biased list of which classes are (or are not) useful in everyday life as an adult. I'm not including classes that would be useful in a specific career -- these are all classes that will help an adult understand the news and current events, the world around them, and how to effectively function in society no matter what career path they choose.
First, the sciences. Basic biology and chemistry are a must in order to grasp the building blocks of life. You'll forget how to do the equations for the reactions but at least you'll take away an understanding of organisms on both the molecular and the whole-being level. These classes were required at my high school and both were pretty well-taught. I'd also like to see a required basic physics class. I think this would round out the sciences nicely. A good understanding in these three subjects would hopefully prevent flawed thinking such as "I'll turn the heat up to 90 degrees to warm the house up faster" or "the rainbows I can see in the sprinkler must be some sort of government conspiracy".
Math. Why do people hate math? My career does not involve any of the really fascinating things I learned in calculus but I use basic algebra and geometry all the time and I'm sure most adults do, even if they don't realize it.
Health. Oh my gosh this class was boring and maybe it could be combined with biology but you really do need to know what is happening when you take a mood-altering drug and how to prevent pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases. I actually remember the things we learned in this mind-numbing required class.
Accounting. We were required to take a personal finance class which I think was useful but didn't go quite far enough. Some basic accounting concepts could have been added because no matter what you choose to do, even if you hire an accountant, you will be somewhat responsible for managing and keeping track of your money. Personal finance was another painfully boring class but yeah, important.
History. What don't I remember? Ancient history. We all had to study the Mayans or whatever but I don't see the relevance to adult life. I did take a really nifty humanities class where we learned about mythology and art history... maybe ancient history could go here, as an elective. What is useful is recent history. For US high school students I would say that at the very least this should cover events that occurred on North America (and on other continents when it's relevant) from about the 1500s to the present. I would say the majority of the subject matter should be very recent history, however, which is precisely the part we pretty much skipped. Everyone should graduate with an understanding of all the wars and other major events within memory of our oldest citizens and we barely touched on this.
Ha. I saved Engligh for last and that's because I think this is the class with the most misguided emphasis. We were required to take English every year and still, the majority of my class graduated with not even a rudimentary understanding of English grammar. Reading literature and poetry and guessing at symbolism and talking about how it makes you feel could be saved for an elective. What you really need to know no matter what career you choose is how to write correctly and in a way that people will understand. We had no grammar at all past seventh grade or so which is probably why most people who graduated when I did write on about a seventh grade level. Seriously.
So there's how it would go, if suddenly I were to be named dictator of public schools or something. I know there are plenty of other interesting or useful subjects but I stand by my list of what I would say are the bare minimum required necessities. Students with interests in other areas may take other classes as electives.
Some smart-ass is going to notice grammatical errors in my post, I'm sure. There you go.
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