Or, say, history. It feels like the equivalent argument would be, “Why force kids to write history papers? When’s the last time you wrote a paper about history?” I mean… why DO we ask kids to learn history? Because it rounds them out. It makes them less ignorant and illiterate. Because we think people shouldn’t be ignorant about history. We mock politicians (ahem) who tweet utterly ignorant things about history because we expect a passably educated person to at least know the basics. So why not for music too?