I don’t really agree about the premise here. We want people to surpass some basic level of competency in literacy and numeracy skills. The bars which people fall below here are not impressive. Are forced courses a good means to achieve that? In my opinion, no, these forced courses are functionally useless.
You can’t teach things students don’t care to learn.
Any course is functionally useless if you don’t do the work, and my comment was not about people having to take forced courses. It was about people being naive, and willfully so, about the practical value of these courses and then making factually incorrect statements about them being useless for the area of study where they want to make a career. It is identical, only with different subject areas, to a computer science student saying that analytical algebra is useless and has no value. I think most readers in these spaces would see that and say “huh? maybe you’re never going to be working on a CAS system or some other application of it but do you really not comprehend the basic idea, you’re not understanding that there’s direct practical utility in your future career in training yourself to be capable of thinking in those ways?”
It is a failure of factual understanding in how cognitive function and critical thinking arises from the brain. If a person isn’t going to do the work then by all means don’t waste their time, but don’t indulge their factually incorrect stance that it has no utility simply because they also don’t have the basic knowledge to know what that utility is.
But I think you’re blurring the lines between “this is theoretically useful” and “this is a fundamental thing that we should invest in everyone having”