Most of the things you learn in school and college are mostly useless. Except reading, writing and a bit or arithmetic, nothing is really too useful for the majority of people. Most of the things you need for most of the jobs out there you have to learn at the job, anyway. Most of the concepts we'll meet in daily life are never even touched in school. You don't learn about insurance, or what's a bill, or a receipt, or a mortgage, or car mechanics or home repairs. But we learn about biology (why? what has biology to be so widely taught? agreed we are living things, but still), lots of history (interesting, sure, but useful? only if you are Indiana Jones, I suppose), physics (you'll learn all you need about gravitation by age five, anyway), literature (that's more useful than math?).
The syllabuses we trod in our life seem at best random and at worst residual accumulation of pet topics from a long genealogy of teachers. Most of it comes from forgotten times, where you could really grasp ALL the human knowledge of the time, so no selection was needed. Since that's no longer the case, some selection is overdue, for math and for all the rest of topics. But it seems like once installed in the syllabus, there is no way of getting something thrown out. And it should be a continuous work in progress, year in and year out, selecting what must come in and what must go out.
The best that can be said of today's education is not about what we learn, because we forget that soon, but how that learning teaches us to better ways of thinking. In this regard, Mathematics should be considered fundamental. Perhaps an instinctive suspicion of that is what keeps Math in our schools, who knows?