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

[OneUmberJoker]

Maths

@PocketSand

Latin to understand commonly used prefixes and suffixes used like hyper, hypo, ectomy, otomy, ology as well as roots so that I can easily understand that histology was study of cells but hysterectomy was removal of uterus, sigmoidoscopy is examination but sigmoidectomy is removal etc.

Nail on the head. Latin really helps with so many other subjects. It helps you to know the meaning of a word that you've never heard before. Without it, you have to remember lots of individual words or constantly be looking up words you've not heard before. So, yes, helps for English, MFL, sciences, etc.

It used to be history for the analytical rigour and skills it gave me. Then I moved into a role where I was working with data and regretted not having taken a-level maths. If I could go back in time I’d have swapped out my science a-level for maths.

I also think languages were important but not for the language. They gave me an ability to think on my feet as one of the core assessment types was to have 20-30 minutes to prepare a presentation on a random topic to be delivered in the relevant language. That basically mirrors the assessments for lots of jobs that I’ve done and has been one of the areas I’ve excelled in during assessments.

I agree, it's definitely more a matter of learning "skills" for future life rather than learning "subjects" and facts etc. We really should be transitioning to skills based education. Yes, I know subjects like History are supposed to teach analysis etc, but why not just teach the skills without the "baggage" of learning about things that have been irrelevant for most people for centuries unless you've a genuine interest in history? The continued "rote" learning of some things just turns off pupils and they then don't learn the "skills" they should be learning.

Like my Latin, it's not that I still remember Flavia sitting under a tree - i.e. the rote learning words, it's everything else around it, i.e. the tenses, sentence construction, grammar, prefixes, suffixes, gender of words, etc., that made learning foreign languages and English so much easier and means I can make a pretty good stab at guessing what a previously unknown word actually means, not only in English, but other European languages too, and helped enormously when I've been studying statute law and case law as part of my accountancy qualifications.

why not just teach the skills without the "baggage" of learning about things that have been irrelevant for most people for centuries unless you've a genuine interest in history?

How will they know if they're interested in history without covering some? And I suspect just teaching skills would be tedious as anything.

You want schools to stop teaching History, @taxguru?

Please tell me I’ve misunderstood?

How are you anticipating people might develop a genuine interest in the subject if it isn’t taught at a basic level first?

To be honest the thought of billions of humans wandering the planet with absolutely no idea of how human civilisations have been built; what mistakes have been made; how various nations and races have contributed to our common good - in short, no clue about how the world fits together and what it all means … Jeez, that’s even more scary than what we’re currently living through.

Totally agree Padam. If we learned more from history we'd have a far better understanding of the shit show that is the world today and might be a bit less hell bent on repeating the same mistakes over and over again!

Ah, but which bit of history are you talking about? And whose version of history?

I learned about the Tudors at school; a friend of mine learned about Gustav Vasa. Which of us is more or less educated?

I also studied the Second World War. My grandparents lived through it. Very different perspectives and lessons taken from it.

The skills needed to analyse and study history should definitely be taught. As should the basics of what history is (and why it’s not an absolute). But I don’t necessarily think the specifics matter.

You want all knowledge of our past to die out?

To be clear, I want the potentially boring (to some) "rote learning" aspects of history to be scrapped, and I don't want it scrapped completely, plenty of opportunities to develop a genuine interest in History in primary years or early secondary years before exam years. The rote learning just turns off too many people who may otherwise have been interested in studying it.

I did history at GCSE, A-level and degree. Don't remember much rote learning, especially not compared with times tables in maths, chemical symbols, verb tables in languages, etc.

Swimming. Nearly drowned recently, and it was only going on my back and giving it as much as I could with backstroke (as I remembered being better at this at school than breaststroke) which saved my life.
English overall careerwise, but the more senior I get, the more I find I am relying on Maths and IT (spreadsheets and budgeting galore). Also History was useful, as I need to be able to critically analyse lots of pieces, check the validity of sources carefully, and learn lessons from the past, including mixed reactions and adoption of new tech, which is increasingly relevant with AI coming into my workplace.
Also Home Ec at home, for obvious reasons, but also Textiles (I sew/mend more now than I shop for clothes) and foreign languages for fun (there's a cause and effect problem here though as if I'd chosen different languages, I'd probably visit different countries more often).
PSHE as it was in my time was complete bollocks. I could have done with knowing about how things like the culture of office life, the etiquette of a typical dinner party, how to save for a house deposit, and how pensions and probate work, instead of rubbish about friendships and bullying, none of which helped me out at all as I was an antisocial recluse for most of school.

There are some subjects were "rote learning" is essential such as times tables, prime numbers, etc., as you'd take many times longer doing questions if you had to keep referring back to reference material when trying to solve or simplify an equation!

There is no need at all to "rote learn" the exact year of Henry 8th's death - what's more important is context, i.e. who succeeding him, what other relevant events were happening around the same time, etc. It really doesn't matter if a pupil gets the year wrong by a few years as long as it's generally in the right ball park.

Different teachers have different approaches. When my son did History at secondary around a decade ago, one of his history teachers (he had for years 7, 10 and 11) was fanatical about them learning dates, constantly having "mini tests" every couple of weeks in class to test them as to whether they've learned their dates etc. The teachers he had for years 8 and 9 did none of that and spent time on "skills" instead, such as evaluating sources, bias, etc., which are things the other teacher barely touched on, even in the GCSE years as he was too obsessed with dates to the detriment of all else and other "facts" such as number of soldiers in the new model army, number of people in the York Pogroms.

I’ve studied history up to degree level but I don’t remember any rote learning? I suppose there were some dates on different douses that needed to be drummed in but nothing else?

I remember plenty of rote learning for GCSE history. I had Wilson’s Fourteen Points blu tacked to the ceiling above my bed (and glad I did, as a question came up I needed to know them for).

I think what feels like rote learning is very dependent on aptitudes and interests. I found History very much about learning facts because I just have no natural ability for History and found the analysis part of it deathly boring. So I learnt what I needed to know to pass the end of year exams and gave it up asap.

OTOH, I did not need to sit down and learn times tables, chemical symbols or verb tables and remembered most of it (especially up to GCSE level) with very little effort. Languages and science are the things I'm best at. And so all these things made sense to me in a way that History really didn't.

With the History rote learning I think it depends on the teacher really. They have their own ideas as to what's important and how to teach, and given my son's relatively recent experiences (last decade) it was definitely teacher age which dictated. The teacher he had for 3 years who did rote learning and regular fact tests was virtually retirement age. The others who concentrated on bias, research, evaluation of evidence etc were in their 20's! You can guess which teachers the kids preferred!

Learning (or deducing) most of those prefixes and suffixes isn’t very hard anyway, compared to learning the science itself IMO. I’ve never been convinced by that argument. DH was forced to do latin O level and reckons it was a complete waste of time, never had any issues with complex terminology.

anyway my most important subject has to be chemistry as it’s what I did 2 degrees in and then is the basis of my nearly 40 year career. Followed by maths some of which was vital.

I’m very interested in various other subjects now such as history and archaeology but they seem more amenable to learning about when you’re older than the stem subjects.

I agree @ErrolTheDragon
I have never had a Latin lesson in my life and had no difficulty understanding the Latin terms I had to learn at medical school. A reasonably literate English speaker shouldn't find it particularly difficult to deduce that flexor digitorum profundus will be deep to flexor digitorum superficialis, or be unable to figure out what those muscles do. A knowledge of Latin may enable you to deduce the meaning of some unfamiliar English words but the opposite is also true!
I've no objection to Latin as a subject, it's probably very interesting if you are that way inclined, but its usefulness in science and medicine is often vastly overstated.

I think i make the most practical use, in life and work, from psychology a level. Things like data analysis, critical thinking and questionning, ethics, and how to approach research. It was also a fascinating subject, I loved geography too and did my degree in this but sadly it doesn't have as much long term use in my adult life.

Totally agree with that - I have a couple of degrees in Psychology and the most important thing is data analysis and questioning every article/piece of research and asking 'is this really saying that?'.

A level psychology didn't exist when I was 18 but I'm glad it does if it teaches those skills. I wish they taught them in schools (along with financial literacy) to all pupils.

Different arty different times of my adult life. Currently probably biology or English. At other times maths.

English, maths and chemistry.

Learning Latin is not just about the vocabulary. I found when I started accountancy, it benefited from the same sort of thinking as was needed in Latin.

At the time I did my professional exams, the pass rate for first time UK graduates was 50%; due partly to the incredible time pressure. The graduates with the top pass rate among those, had done Classics degrees.

I'm sure it has its uses, I never said otherwise. The comment to which I was replying was specifically around the claim that Latin is valuable for health care professionals and other scientists because it aids the understanding of terminology.
If there is any statistically meaningful correlation between success in medicine and prior study of Latin it will probably be because it is acting as proxy for having been privately educated and it is actually one or more of the factors associated with that which is significant. I doubt very much that the actual knowledge gained by having studied Latin to GCSE (or O level in my day) puts the aspiring medic at anything more than a very trivial advantage over those who haven't. The first time you see an anatomy textbook maybe it helps, but it doesn't take long to figure out the Latin even if you've had no prior experience. It's obviously not going to be harmful either and it is as valid as any other choice at GCSE but I don't think that it is helpful to any real degree in this specific context..

We have a DD with a rare syndrome and an ultra rare syndrome.

She’s in the top league in the UK for the rare syndrome, per Queens Sq. We’ve never met anyone with it worse. We can only read research papers on it.

There is no specialist in the UK on the ultra rare syndrome. She was the first person, Queen’s Sq had met with it. We believe there is one other family in the UK with it, and from what we can gather, they don’t have the rare syndrome too. All we can do is read the same medical research papers on the previous known three children in the literature, as DD’s consultants read.

It is a stretch for us to go from being lay people to reading medical research papers. Knowing Latin helps me to understand the research papers, without 10+ years medical training first. (How long does it take to be a professor in neurology?)