What has been the most important school subject in your adult life?

[OneUmberJoker]

Maths

Well, in terms of all life : English and maths
My specific job: biology

Drama! Learning how to speak in front of audiences, project and communicate in an engaging way.

I can do all that but I don’t learn it in Home Ecc. That was just a stressful rushed mess of a lesson on how to make shit pizza.

English (reading and writing) and maths.

Science, specifically biology. I work in healthcare and I am amazed how little people understand about how their bodies work.

Maths is the obvious one (run my own business, need to be able to do forecasts etc as well as for example yesterday I ordered some new tiles and paint as we're redecorating, so it comes in useful every day), but likewise English for puting together a good pitch, formulating ad campaigns etc, heck I've even written a book.

However realistically the choices of subject that I think have changed my career and income beyond where I'd otherwise be are drama (naturally shy, but drama helped me create a character so when I'm presenting I'm not Jane, but Jane The Business Owner, and she's not me so I don't feel vulnerable being up front and center) which gave me confidence, clarity of speech and the ability to hold attention when presenting, and then the other subject is IT, enabling me to build my own websites, start my first business at 18 when ebay was in it's infancy and grow several ecommerce brands since, to know how to use digital marketing as well as the basics of photoshop, office suite, to recognise how I can use AI and how it can streamline some of the processes I use in my business and so on. I think a lot of this is critical thinking and soft skill based rather than the typical 'hard skill' subjects in my case.

Drama hands down. Useful every day.

Latin

Has been incredibly useful over the years in many different contexts.

Housecraft, we did about health and fitness in it.

Same here. Studying Latin has made it much easier for me to understand words I didn't know previously enabling me to make educated guesses as to what they mean, especially with the prefixes and suffixes, and also the links between words that contain the same "core". Made learning modern foreign languages much easier too, even those not derived from Latin as such, such as German, as you've got a better idea of all the different tenses and grammatical/sentence construction which are often poorly taught in school English lessons. It also helped me when it came to be doing tax and law exams in my professional accountancy exams years later.

Amazingly, our son's state school still did Latin (when he started in 2012) and he loved it too. Slightly different in that they taught "language learning" in year 7 which was a mix of Latin, Greek and other sentence/tenses/grammar constructions plus other aspects such as Roman Numerals, Greek alphabet (for equations/science etc), and even threw in a bit of Greek Mythology! Son loved it all. Then they went on to study Latin as it's own subject in year 8 and 9 (they could opt out and doing an extra MFL instead such as Spanish), and then they still offered it as a GCSE for years 10 and 11 which was surprisingly popular.

DS said it gave him greater confidence particularly in English and MFL subjects.

English. Maths to a point but I think instead of complex maths above what you need day to day or in job roles, kids should be taught maths in terms of actual financial management in the real world and the importance of getting it right if you want to own a home and not kill yourself in piles of debt.

I had no idea how money, finances, loans, credit and getting a mortgage actually worked because not a single person in my life bothered to teach me. Way more important than an GCSE box ticking exercise imo and I am only now getting fully out of the debt cycle at 38.

English for my career. History of Art for personal pleasure. Home Economics for real life knowledge/skills!

History - my first insight into politics and a broader understanding of the world and relationships between countries etc

I did French O level too and it is surprising how much I’ve retained. I can even understand most of the reviews in French on Amazon. I’m not great at understanding the French spoken word though.

Mathematics and English, but history has been really helpful in helping me understand how to analyze situations, present arguments and apply concepts like nuance, cause and effect, context etc. which are very important in my career.

"All schools did Latin"

Possibly if you lived in the Roman Empire or maybe during the 15th century when "all schools" meant "all monasteries".

Latin has never been a core part of the National Curriculum (which has only existed since the late 1980s anyway). My grandparents didn't do it, nor did my aunts and uncles, nor did my mum nor did most of my cousins.

And "everyone" didn't do the 11+
There were always huge differences across the country about availability of grammar schools and who did the entrance exams. Many children pre-1944 didn't even attend a secondary school.

The tripartite system came in following the 1944 Education Act and the move towards comprehensivisation was underway by 1965 so, even if there had been a time when "everyone" took the 11+, it would only have been for 20 years.

How many girls in 1950s Secondary Moderns do you think were studying Latin?

The only thing I got from school that I use at work at all comes from messing around with Paint (the program, not the art material) in IT class. It is genuinely surprising how much I still use it - though I’m hoping that’s one thing AI will finally kill off.

Everything else that’s been useful for me I learned outside of the school environment.

Latin was very common if you go back to before the 1960s/70s reorganisations. If you're talking about the national curriculum, you're not really going back that far at all.

I did a bit of historical research of our village's "free" grammar school, dating back to the 1700s and 1800s - funnily enough they didn't teach English and Maths - that was regarded as the parent's job. They taught science and classics, free of charge.

I was going to say the same.

Germans used to think I was German but from another part of Germany even though I have an incredibly English name - think Jane Smith.

Apart from German, definitely the most useful subject has been maths. I used quite a lot of my A-Level maths in my career.

Did anyone else have rural science? We did it for first 2 years of school so many lessons on it. Why?! Zero use to me and never hear of it now!

Latin was very common if you go back to before the 1960s/70s reorganisations.

Only in certain types of schools. My mother, who went to a secondary modern, never studied it. Neither did her parents, who left after primary school.

My father and his parents, who all went to grammar / private schools, did study it.

I’m surprised at how many people on MN have studied it, though, as it really wasn’t a common subject for state schools in my area in the 1980s / 1990s. Perhaps privately educated people here are in the majority.

My mother, on the other side of the ocean, was taught Latin as part of an Anglo-centric school curriculum in the 1940s.

She found the small amount of knowledge she had infinitely useful when she came to the UK for professional training in the 1950s.

Latin. It’s amazing how useful it’s been and I went to a bog standard secondary modern.

Typing. Use it every day.