Well, today I'm a Machine Learning Engineer at a FAANG company and I have no regrets not wasting my youth on some stupid assignments that everyone forgot about as soon as it was graded.
Strategies optimized for the students who would be motivated enough to pursue top 1% engineering jobs are not useful for the average student. In fact, they’d probably be harmful.
It’s a similar story on the other end of the spectrum: Learning strategies optimized for the lowest common denominator students aren’t good for the average student, and certainly aren’t good for highly motivated learners.
It’s a difficult problem and I don’t have any answers. However, given that your career trajectory is firmly in outlier territory, I don’t think it’s reasonable to project your grade school academic experience on to the general student population.
Even now, even in the US, only 30% of children grow up to be college students. So when we're talking about the average, the median, what I'm saying is in fact typical.
They learn to read. Which they would have done anyway. They learn what arithmetic means, sort of. Might pick up history and geography if they're natively interested in it. At no point is the two hours of homework they're forced into every night of any benefit to learning these things.
I'm an SRE for a high ML product you've heard of and this explains so much.