Reading is not that hard to maintain even. What kind of a social environment the school is to discourage such disinterest in maintaining reading skills? Where is the internet? Where is the texting? Where are the blogs, or the twitter even? Literacy should be stronger than ever before.
Mathematics? For god sake, what reason do we need to learn useless concept like cosine, sine, and tanget and how to do the quadratic equation? What everyone probably need is an education on how to manage their money and do financial calculation, but beyond that, it is mostly unneccesary. I serously doubt business manager, nails shop, and musicians need to know that.
Programmers at the very least need to know algebra. If he want to do cooler stuff, he can learn on his own, just like how he learn all his tools and programming languages.
Other field may required lot of mathematics. If you need mathematics for your career, why not take a school specialized in making engineers out of you?
Schools, are the very least an hinderance to the economy. It is a test, a fake test at that. It have nothing to very little to do with the performance of our economy.
The smartest scientist in the world probably don't need English Literature 101. English literature is probably the scientist know, but is it revelant to his career? No.
If schools want to be useful to the economy, than make them churn out skilled work force for whatever their economy may need and do it well. We would still have schools like grammatica and mathematics that will equip people with the basic essential(Let face it, it is hard to go anywhere without learning how to write and read and do basic mathematics)
For those who still want a scholar's education(English, Social Science, Alegbra, the work), well...you still have the money to pay for such an education, right?
Let forget all the government beucracry, rules, and abritary grading guideline and start schools like the Hacker School where young and old alike get to learn technologies and skills in fast and furious courses like the Art of Unit Testing or Rails boot camp or whatever.
Our profession doesn't have guilds or unions, occupancy licensure, and all that bullshits that other professions have. If we program, than we're programmers.
If some bold hackers can show the world a successful example of a trade school where teachers teach because they know their stuff and teach well not because of their bullshit degrees and license that said they're teachers. This can be an example to other field to replicate.
Than our frailing education system will begin to rebound and starts to produce workers who are not quadratic equation walking calculator but can actually do real work!
Now, all we need is a little less regulations(actually just abolish all laws regarding education) and the privization of government run schools and their so called educational standard.