Good question.

I find I have used almost nothing I learnt at school, past the first couple of years of primary school anyway. I hardly ever multiply or divide anything except with a calculator.

Other than basic arithmetic, literacy is good but I learnt to read by reading and to write by writing, which I could have done even if I did not go to school.

I think that it is in your sub question "is a point to it" lies the nub. There is no point to learning the stuff that we are taught at school, but that is precisely the point, because there is little point to most of things that we do in our lives.

Most of us do jobs which are essentially pointless to the individual that is doing them. They don't involve getting food, sex, or being creative. A lot of them are backroom or soilatry and don't even get love in the form of a thank you or smile. But in order to become a cog in an organsation, and get paid, we need to get used to doing pointless things.

Schools teach us to like learning the Kings and Queens of England or the Presidents of the United States, the periodic table, and trigonometry, and other pointless things, because the majority of social life is pointless, and people who can do pointless things enthusiastically are highly valuable as members of society.

As well as to enjoy or endure pointlessness, school teaches us other things too, such as to respect the content of books, routives and authority. See Ivan Illich and others who write about "The Hidden Curriculum," which "consists of those things pupils learn through the experience of attending school rather than the stated educational objectives of such institutions" (Haralambos).

I have been thinking about 'the hidden curriculum' since I was a rebellious child but it was a Japanese teacher at the University of Newcastle who shared with me the true horror of the hidden curriculum - the point is pointlessness - and he became pathologically depressed shortly thereafter. Dangerous wisdom?