However, no one (except my Dad) ever taught me how to balance a check book, figure out a tax rate, keep a set of books for a business, etc. I think education in the US is becoming more and more polarized. In many of the private schools, where proper behavior is required, students are getting excellent educations. In many public schools, it;s primarily a minimum security prison or babysitting and tranquilizing service.
So don't you think it should be the other way around?
The building trades instructor and you are one in a hundred -- whereas everybody could use the skills only your Dad taught you and many others are not so fortunate to have anybody teach them. The latter should be the core curriculum -- and once people have that core down pat, they can direct their own education depending on their interests and needs. You don't need to design a curriculum for the geniuses in the world -- or the prodigies; however advanced you try to make the curriculum, if they're really prodigious, they'll far outstrip any teacher. The best one can do for those prodigies -- as well as for the rest of the class, is to let them teach! They know what their fellow classmates are going through.
That's how it is in the real world. Those who understand it well, teach the rest. They don't just go on proving how smart they are -- knowing what everybody else doesn't.
In that teaching, they discover what it is they don't really know. That's why Leibniz and Newton created calculus