You do realize you get to choose which courses to take in undergrad right? Universities aren’t forcing you to take any of the courses, you choose ones in subjects you are interested in, and first year is to get you up to speed/introduce you to those subjects, so you can decide if you want to study them further.
That’s not true at all, every degree has a required core curriculum at every university I’ve ever heard of (e.g., humanities, some amount of math, some amount of English, etc). It also says nothing for the K-12 years.