I didn't know "applicability to a career" was the ultimate measure of the worth of classes and school in general.
Granted, much of the current pedagogy is useless (especially the hours and hours of homework) and when I start teaching high school physics a year from now I'll keep that in mind. However, to me, the purpose of education is not job training. Every different class teaches you how to look at the world from a different perspective with a different tool set. For the 99% of my future students who won't become physicists and the 90% who won't be scientists or engineers*, my class will be "useless" to them. But, I'll consider my teaching a success if they leave my class with the understanding that the world is comprehensible, that it follows patterns, that it is worth observing closely.
History is useful for when our President says, "They hate us for our freedom."
Foreign languages are useful since
not everything survives translation.
English classes are useful because I like to have models for how to communicate forcefully and with style.**
Ideally, the totality of these "useless" classes should show is that everything around us is worth observing closely: literature, history, Earth, space, art, and other people. When I spent a semester in Budapest, the most intimate knowledge of Hungary came from a comparative literature course.
Maybe it's just me.
But I don't think so.
Robert Heinlein wrote:A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, design a building, write a sonnet, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, solve equations, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly.
Specialization is for insects.
* Numbers made up.
** Sometimes I think classes in rhetoric should be brought back. Never mind what you're saying, say it better!