Cross curricular, skills-based teaching - dumbing down?

[emkana]

My feeling is that I prefer subject teaching at secondary level, can anybody convince me of the advantages?

Never heard of it? Is this a school that you're looking at?

Yes I know of a couple of secondary schools (both grammar and comp) who have taken lessons away from the humanities to teach a "skills based curriculum".

Well having some time spent teaching proper project, research and essay skills must be pretty useful. Actually ds1's school does this. But they still have plenty of subject specific teaching, so I guess I would wonder at how much time is given over to it - any more than 3 periods a week might make me wonder what they're missing.

I left a school that wanted to do this. There reasoning was that the students with behaviour issues were not coping in lessons and therefore a change across the whole school was needed. It was dumbing down.

That may not be the case every where but it certainly was in this case.