Since when is education about only learning the things that a student, in their current ignorance, project they'll need far into the future? Trig and calculus are trivial, learn them. (I'd argue that a solid understanding in both would make personal finance a lot better a subject too.) In any case, my high school offered all of those classes, with personal finance being required and trig being taught along the way in several required math courses.
Since when is high school education? High school is preparation for the real world: it has replaced the old apprenticeships and parental involvement that served as life preparation for centuries.
High school fails in this purpose when it wastes time teaching trigonometry and calculus to those who have no need for it. The majority of people do not graduate college; of the ones that do graduate college, many will never use trigonometry or calculus in their occupations or personal pursuits.
It makes no more sense to teach every high school student trigonometry and calculus than it makes to teach every high school student how to retread tires or operate a band saw.
I think it makes a great deal of sense to teach every student how to operate a band saw. And also how to dance, and how to read poetry, and how to draw with perspective, and how to use a potter’s wheel, and how to solve Newtonian mechanics problems, and how to build simple electrical circuits, how some basic cooking chemistry works, and how double-entry bookkeeping works, and some basic music theory, and how to operate a non-linear video editor, and on and on. Not every student necessarily needs to learn every thing, but schools should have the resources to teach many things to every student.
If kids are going to spend half of their time for 13 years (!) in school, I sure hope they’re learning all sorts of useful things. Drilling them on geography or historical dates or the content of 19th century “classic” novels, &c., certainly isn’t the only important thing in the world.
Okay, how about this: every student should learn trigonometry and how to dance and how to cook and how double-entry bookkeeping works and how to speak several foreign languages, most (personally I think all or nearly all) students should learn calculus, and a large (much larger than now) percentage should learn how to operate a band saw. Calculus is just absolutely fundamental to so much of the technology that we use every day that students who do not learn calculus are at a serious disadvantage comprehending our built environment.
Calculus is not fundamental to the technology that we use every day. I work an extremely technically challenging job and I'm serious, I haven't used calculus or trigonometry since my last physics exam in undergrad. Am I happy I know them? Sure, because I like knowing things. Are they even remotely useful in my everyday life? Not a bit.
Please, by all means, demonstrate a place where a person who doesn't know calculus is at a disadvantage interacting with the technology of the world around us. Until then, I'm calling bullshit.
