Schools usually overfund athletics, math, and science. And they cut the arts.
But let's think about this. What inspired more growth of human spirit?
Was it the Pantheon (not to be confused with the Parthenon, this is a cement building that as lasted 1200 years)? Was it the Cistine Chapel? Was it Margaret Keane's paintings?
Or was it our athetics and military? Athletics is necessary to stay fit. But it shouldn't be a major, and it shouldn't fund scholarships. We don't need jocks to prop up an already bloated military, we just need a sufficient military to defend our country and a no-posturing system to diplomacy and warfare. Require a few years of military like Israel and South Korea. Then let most of us get on with our lives.
Or was math and science? Our math and science created genetically modified organisms in our food and actual attempts to "patent" seeds by making them non-reproducible, grapes so grafted that they can't really breed normally anymore, bananas that are so cloned that a single blight could wipe a huge number out, medicine that is actively research gain of function to make people sick instead of first doing no harm, banks that screw with people's lives and then get bailed out for it, and weapons of mass destruction from bio-weapons to atom bombs to even one weapon that clears people without any destruction to property.
We need more creative people. More novelists, more poets, more musicians, and more artists. Not more idiots who think they are smart because they learned what other mathematicians or other scientists taught. We can do without climate indoctrination, RE indoctrination, and NASA secularism. If you personally want to become a scientist, just as if you personally decide you are an atheist, that's on you. But the government has no business funding any of that crap. If you want, fund actual promising artists. People who create beauty and wonder in this world grow a more peaceful and prosperous vision of the future. What has science and math brought us in the last 100 years but destructive machines, higher taxes, and more war and control? Cut their funding and give it to people who make stuff like this.
People ought to be inspired, not oppressed. Or as someone once said,
Once, a long time ago, there was a wise Zen master. People from far and near would seek his counsel and ask for his wisdom. Many would come and ask him to teach them, enlighten them in the way of Zen. He seldom turned any away.
One day an important man, a man used to command and obedience came to visit the master. “I have come today to ask you to teach me about Zen. Open my mind to enlightenment.” The tone of the important man’s voice was one used to getting his own way.
The Zen master smiled and said that they should discuss the matter over a cup of tea. When the tea was served the master poured his visitor a cup. He poured and he poured and the tea rose to the rim and began to spill over the table and finally onto the robes of the wealthy man. Finally the visitor shouted, “Enough. You are spilling the tea all over. Can’t you see the cup is full?”
The master stopped pouring and smiled at his guest. “You are like this tea cup, so full that nothing more can be added. Come back to me when the cup is empty. Come back to me with an empty mind.”
What in modern terms is called technocracy. The people are too learned to filled wit the biases of former teachers, too filled with destructive knowledge, and not open or kind. They use craft to rule over others.