I think math and science are great; I appreciate people who are good at that kind of stuff, and agree that a working knowledge of both are useful for those who aren't. However, schools like HTHS spend a lot of time focusing on encouraging kids toward math and science while the English and history departments often go by the wayside. The Obama Administration encourages kids to pursue math and science careers, but to my knowledge hasn't said anything about careers in the arts.
You can be a deep thinker and feeler, a logical, insightful, and self-aware human being without knowing much about math and science. You can't if you haven't read beautiful literature, or learned logic and rhetoric, or learned about the historical context you live in. If the powers that be encourage kids toward awesome left-brained things but allow them to neglect their abstract minds, they're going to get a generation of people who can calculate and compute, but can't express themselves or empathize with others. And that's probably what they're after.