Chemistry

Why on earth do they teach chemistry in high school? Biology I get: it's everywhere we look and it's fascinating - all this from such simple origins. Physics too (natch). What could be more interesting than learning about how the universe and everything in it work? All those weird forces - the ones we take for granted intuitively, like the resistance of a solid object or the pull of gravity, and the more mysterious ones, like magnetism. And it's all essential for understanding technology as engineering rather than magic.

But what's the deal with chemistry? Couldn't they just spend two weeks talking about acids & bases and be done with it? What's the point to learning about stoichiometry, solubility constants (whose unmotivated definition is pretty strange), electronegativity, cations and all that other arcana? It really seems like a bunch of obscure and pointless stuff for anyone not planning on a career in chemistry. Yeah, OK, it's pretty important for doing biology. But really, anyone going on in biology is going to have to learn all this stuff over again in college, because it's being taught at such a low level in HS. It just doesn't seem important to creating a "well rounded citizen" able to function and contribute in society.

I really get the feeling that it's there for historical reasons. Kind of like the year-long course in geometry in the math sequence.