In our case,

Yeah, we had all that stuff too. This was many years ago, but I remember the electricity section being fairly basic, as in mostly covering how volts and amps interact (i.e. high voltage, low amps is way worse than low voltage, high amps, in terms of safety). And that’s really about it. Maybe we covered other stuff, but it really wasn’t important to go further, probably because I went to school before EVs and whatnot were commonplace.

I think my education was quite good. I was very much prepare for the university I went to, but that kind of meant we skipped some important stuff. For example:

the economics course in high school included our tax system

We didn’t really learn economics or taxes in high school. I mean, we discussed basic supply and demand, but that was more in the context of history than anything actually applicable to life (i.e. Great Depression’s impacts on supply and demand). I learned the vast majority of what I know about economics, investing, and taxes on my own because I’m interested in it. It just didn’t seem to make the cut for high school, where we learned a wide variety of other stuff, like biology, math, history, English, etc. A basic high school day was broken up into 6 periods, usually consisting of:

1. math - start w/ geometry and end at pre-calc or calculus (depending on which track you took)
2. history - US, European, world, etc
3. english - literature, writing, etc
4. foreign language - needed 2 years; select between Spanish, German, Japanese, or French (maybe one or two more); the other two years were electives IIRC (but more restrictive than the next group)
5. electives - PE, shop, etc; there were several options, no guarantees as to what people took
6. science - biology, chemistry, physics, etc

I did two years at the high school and two years at the local community college so I could get a 2-year college degree at the same time as my high school diploma. That was pretty rad, but I wonder if maybe I got super compressed education since I had about half the class time as my peers (about 3 hours/day vs 6), but we had more reading at home, which I think made up for it (I’d spend 3-4 hours/day studying vs 1-2 hours from regular high school).

However, at the end of it, there were some gaps:

• didn’t know how taxes worked - pretty easy to learn later, but I did need to teach myself (I think we had a PF elective option)
• didn’t know how economics worked - basically anything at the government policy level was a black box - we covered basic supply and demand, but not how the fed creates money, tariffs, etc, outside of some brief mentions in US history
• very basic overview of how consumables like electricity and natural gas work - i.e. what a watt hour is, or how to compare electricity and gas; school mostly stuck to principles and theory, not practical things like understanding your gas bill

I don’t think that was a failure per se, it just wasn’t deemed important since the whole point of high school was to prepare you for college, and anything that didn’t help with that seemed to get dropped. I think this is unfortunate, and that high school should have you ready to make a decent wage outside of school (i.e. finish w/ marketable skills, like the German system does).

Absolutely mandatory (like 60% of total course load), school specialty curriculum (like 20-30% of total) and then the rest was up to you to choose what you wanted to learn.

Yeah, we were pretty similar, except we didn’t have “school school specialty curriculum” since I went to public school, and public schools are standardized in what they teach. So we had something like 70-80% as mandatory curriculum, which prepares you for college, and 20-30% electives, which hopefully prepare you for life. I did shop (make stuff out of wood), home ec (cooking), drawing (nearly failed, I suck at art), and visual communications (graphic design, photography, etc survey course).