[Tired of Taxes]

"I believe it ended when schools graded themselves not on kids being successful in life after school, but on being "successful" getting into college like college in and of itself was the goal."

Bingo. In post #12, I wrote that, somewhere along the way, people started looking down on "personal finance" or "consumer math" courses.

You gave the reason why. These days, high school students follow a cookie-cutter education intended as college prep.

[Tell It Right]

After a divorce and marrying again, my wife and I committed to hunkering down on our finances, paying off debts, putting aside money for kids' trade school/college, and investing for us retiring early.

To be fair to the argument for higher math and such, I used a little extra math and programmer wizardry to optimize some of those financial steps. So even in normal home economics decisions it can be helpful to have some of the advanced math offered in high school. But as helpful as those skills are, they don't come close to learning even more important skills such as personal responsibility and being your own financial accountant to make sure cash coming in is more than cash flowing out. Basically, excelling at practical application of simple math is way better than never applying math even if you're good at calculus.