The kids I worked with were engaged in an entertainment opportunity, rather than some kind of mentorship for troubled youths, or scholarship. I worked with posh little kiddos and literal charity cases (kids enrolled via charity organizations) and everything in between. Some kids were "forced" to be there, some kids weren't. Some kids were physically healthy, some kids were ailed.

I won't belabor the point, but while I will always provide for bias in my consideration, my sample subjects are the absolute least of my concerns. It was a wide enough variety, and I've compared it to enough adult-oriented psychoanalytical literature, that I feel comfortable speaking confidently about it.

As far as needing to be careful, I agree! We should ALWAYS be careful when doing things in the interest of other people and children especially. I fully support mandatory learning because even aside from practical skills, an ignorant populace is empirically more likely to foment and tolerate a fascist government. I think kids should be forced to learn all kinds of things, and a much wider variety of things than we currently teach. Where I make the distinction is that I think they should also be ALLOWED to learn the things they WANT to learn. By which I mean we shouldn't just tolerate it, we should make explicit space for it. Whatever it is. And that can be distasteful to a lot of people, but the situation - now - is that a kid CAN learn about anything they want to learn about, via the internet, so your option is to facilitate that curiosity into either satisfied disinterest or an upstanding pursuit, or to calcify it as a taboo.

It may be audacious to talk to kids in graphic or sensational terms about violence, but when their school getting shot up is a real daily possibility, it's disingenuous to NOT talk about it. THEY will be talking about it. So when YOU don't talk about it, they can feel how artificial it seems, just like anyone else.

So, yes: learn arithmetic, so you can learn algebra, so you can learn geometry, so you can learn physics. But if we have to cut chemistry to make room for some individual learning time, let's do it. Shove the practical parts of it into a cooking class and leave anything more complex to higher or elective ed.