I'm not convinced calculus, geometry and European are "less important". I don't even think you can understand truly understand the tulip bubble without understanding early modern European history (or 08 and the crypto bubble and US history for that matter -- e.g. the birth of the Fed and all that). It's not enough to simply say "don't get caught in a speculative bubble" because 1. it's hard to know when you're in a bubble (housing has utility after all, part of the reason this was so disastrous was because hardly anyone defaulted on a mortgage before) 2. people will get hurt regardless (it's not like only the speculators got hurt in 08) 3. this is sorta just "no shit" advice in general, and yet people still get caught up in speculation. So if you want to convince anyone, you need to be able to formulate arguments on broad history rather than relying on pedagogy to simply convince people not to take some unclear action.

There's probably a lot more to be said about math education in general, but I'll just note that this seems to be a recurring debate in general. Personally, I wished my math education was more rigorous and more abstract. Obviously not everyone uses calculus, but also not everyone takes calculus. I'd also rather a society where a significant portion of students are trained to think of things in terms of rates of change and accumulation of change and apply that to solve physical problems, rather than the society in which even talented students are just trained to add up spare change.