This discussion raises mind killer flags for me. Just a warning to those caught in it.
Also, there are people who can do without trig? To me that seems among the most concretely usable math there is in all kinds of situations. if you have to measure any distances or angles you can't do without it and I can't think of many things where you can do without that outside of compsci.
Economics has calculus all over the place, but trig much more rarely.
This guy says that the problem is that high-school math education is structured to prepare people to learn calculus in their freshman year of college. But only a small minority of students ever takes calculus, and an even smaller minority ever uses it. And not many people ever make much use of pre-calc subjects like algebra, trig, or analytic geometry.
Instead, high-school math should be structured to prepare people to learn statistics. Probability and basic statistics, he argues, are not only more generally useful than calculus, they are also more fun.
I have to agree with him. What do the people here think?