Education reform anybody?

           How many of you can think back to all of the things we had to learn in high school and wonder, "why?"...
            What has knowing the pythagorean theorem helped you with in your life? What about the quadratic formula, has knowing that greatly improved your life? It seems to me that high school was mostly spent wasting my time learning things that I would never use again. And most people would probably agree that they haven't used a significant amount of the knowledge that they aquired during high school. I understand that some of my personal ideals on what should be taught in high schools could be considered quite controversal. Myself included, along side many of my peers from my childhood have, since high school, had hard times financially. Why not teach how to balance a checkbook, or how to establish credit in high school. How about teaching high school students how to be self sufficient, eg. learn how to have a balanced diet and how to cook meals. This is knowledge most would say is for the parents to teach their children, but when a parent is working all the time and trying to keep everything at home functioning where is the time to adequately teach all of these life skills. Shouldn't high school be more about preparing an individual for the real world? So many high school students graduate and have no life skills, they only know how to go to class and do homework. Specialized skills like advanced algebra and Chemistry should be a part of focused college classes that pertain to ones individual area of study. Things like English and mental math should be more of a focus so that when students leave high school they can add, subtract, multiply, and divide easily in their head and should be able to speak, read, and write efficiently. Forget competing with countries like China where students don't even have a summer break, functional skills are what we need. What do you think?