tldr - First we have to be clear what education is, and what do we really what out of it!
First, Fuck Chemistry.
People have to first realize that the "academia" is not anymore a place to gain knowledge(I dont even know has it ever been). That's merely a side-effect. It's just a molding machine that caters to the "industries". But look at the way it's built, as if it everyone is going to be everything, all at once - biochemists, mathematicians, particle phycists, material scientists. Why do I fucking need to know about all the fucking benzene, carboxyethoxyacetoxy-3-4CHoo=COO-OOO, all such fucking kubrickesque mazes and beehives of Cs and Os and Hs, covalent-bond, Pipetting and titrating and mugging up colors and random pungent odors and all the fucking calculus and all the distributions in probability theory and linear algebra, cell membrane and thousand layers of dermis and protoplasm and all those minutiae, and stuff that ought to be enjoyd like History(goddamn, why would anyone want this as a "subject" and conduct "exams" on it. Anyone who is literate can pick it up later in life, anyways.)
My point is not why such and such are taught, rather why everything is taught to everyone. For fuck's sake it's not like everyone is Da Vinci. Of course, everyone has to know something about everything, but the syallabus as it stands is just too much. It's not like every mechanical engineer, who has to study stuff like finite element analysis, is going to design CAD software, in which case it's totally a pointless intellectual masturbation. It always is "Good to Know", "You are gonna need it". Blatant, Motherfucking, lies. You are never going to need to it.
Just split the thing, right from school, into vocational and "pure science". Of course, we don't know what a child would find him/herself interested in, passionate abou,t until later. But, that's precisely the question we have to be asking and researching about, not how to cull off "subjects" from or add more into the current curriculum. And definitely not about "practical" way of teaching(That would be like
restructuring a building but on the same broken foundation). Not everyone is capable of understanding abstract algebra or even simple stuff like recursion, even if you show documentary with 3-D VR tech directed by David Fincher.
Also, we have to realize that every fucking concept is made up, for our own conveniences - that's right - even mathematics, (actually especially maths. This seems obvious, but reality does not reflect we fully understand the implications of this. )
This is important, because we are taught things as if they are god-send - many ideas and concepts were shaken to the core. Things are always reinvented and redefined, for example - set theory after Rusell's paradox. What I mean is context and history of how things, ideas, concepts came into being is very very very important. In short, de-magic things! That naturally gets rid of the fear and makes everything bearable, if not enjoyable.
Also, pliss to teach logic and philosophy - everything else will fall in place automagically.