emy72 brings up a very interesting question:
But we could start a whole new thread I think on the actual value of spending lots of time teaching classics. I, like the OP, was educated in Italy and spent half of my time at high school studying Latin, Ancient Greek, reading all the classics, Roman history, you name it. Although I think I had a very traditional and valuable education, as a teenager I WAS BORED STIFF and despite coming from an upper middle class family, I wished I learnt something useful and contemporary. Something I could actually relate to. Maybe we've gone to the other extreme, but I much much rather my children learnt ICT, languages and art than spend hours pouring over the classics and being as bored as I was - (suddenly yawns profusely and cringes at the thought of her school years).
I did not go to secondary school in Italy, so I'm not an authority on the liceo classico. I know Italians who weep with gratitude at the memory of their classical education; another Italian friend, while not bored, was envious, when she visited my school in New York, to see that the history teacher had postponed the scheduled lesson to discuss the fall of the Berlin Wall, which had happened the evening before. I get suspicious when people talk about "relevance," but the events of 1989 certainly qualify, if anything does!
How is art more "useful" or than Roman history? Absolutely none of the science I learned in school is useful to me in my daily life, but it was certainly interesting, and has value. And a good teacher can make any real subject interesting. That said, I do think that by secondary school students should be able to choose courses of study based on their interests; emy72 could have gone to a liceo scientifico, linguistico, or artistico ? wherever her talents and interests led her.
As for myself, I probably imbibed far too much math and art in my secondary education, in proportion to my interests and talents; in retrospect it was a mistake; I wish I had had some Latin. What I learned in those subjects has not become part of my inner landscape ? the only test of relevance I can think of, and of course it's a hopelessly vague one; Jane Austen writes, in Emma, about making "provision for the evening of life." But I wasn't at all bored in those classes, because my teachers were good, and who's to say that they might not have awakened in me some latent talent? (They didn't, but they certainly could have.) So I'm of two minds: students should choose; but they should also be exposed to unfamiliar subjects. I didn't have to study all that math, but in my school there was an unspoken expectation that ambitious students took math to the bitter end. So it's partly my fault, for succumbing to those subtle pressures. (Back then the scuttlebutt had it that college admissions offices wanted "well-rounded" students; now apparently they're looking for students with conspicuous passions. So I would probably fare better now. I was rebellious enough to drop physics in favor of Russian in my next to last year, but dropping math for yet another language, albeit an ancient one, seemed too risky.)
"Real subject"; "has value": in education one immediately runs into value judgments; they're unavoidable, and hard to justify. JaneiteQuiteRight writes, "ICT is rubbish though. My Yr 10 dd1 spent an hour 'learning' how to send an email last week - bonkers." Honestly, that was my impression of ICT too! Computer skills are useful, but I don't see why a whole course of study has to be devoted to teaching skills that most people easily pick up. If they're going to make a course, it should be computer programming.
I'm not at all surprised by what MillyR writes:
If there isn't a problem with the teaching of English in state schools, why do so many undergraduates arrive at university and struggle with their written English? ? I have some very clever students who are unable to express themselves due to their lack of skills in written English.
As for runningmom's comment ? what she describes is light years away from what I witnessed. Teaching to the test would have been a big step up from the inanity of the lessons I observed (eg tell the order of the planets as if it were a recipe; invent a spy identity for yourself based on a picture from a magazine ? a six-week unit!). Sure, there was plenty of talk about GCSE results, but that didn't mean that there was any sense of urgency about functional illiteracy that crippled so many students.
When I was doing the PGCE I knew I was in a parallel universe where up was down, left was right, war was peace. Since the PGCE I have taught in a variety of settings, some of which explicitly required me to teach to a test. None of it has made me cynical; on the contrary, my post-PGCE experiences have only reinforced my indignation at the injustice perpetrated by British schools. I have taught, for example, in an afterschool academic enrichment center in an immigrant neighbourhood. All the children came from households where English was not spoken. But a lot was expected of them, they worked hard, and their reading and writing skills were significantly better than those of most students in the schools I worked in during my PGCE.