Helps with translating the graffiti in the background when you watch 'Rome.'

Latin. If people's English is poor it's because of poor standards in that subject, not because we need to learn a dead language.
Would you believe at no point in school was I taught about, nouns, verbs, pro nouns etc. No joke.

I would believe that as I have no recollection either. That's not to say it didn't happen, I just don't remember.

I think the problem is currently people think that if you speak a language it means you read and write it as well. Which is completely untrue. English has the disadvantage if being "easy" so people don't bother teaching grammar. Or it's just because teachers can't be bothered... But someone who doesn't know the difference between there, they're and their is not dyslexic but just illiterate.

+1

That's a pretty broad brush you're wielding there!

see the quotation marks :p

It was the part about the quality of the teaching I took exception with! (8-p)

+2

Ditto, and I went to a grammar school. [/irony]

I really, really hated history. I hated it because we didn't actually learn anything about anything. We spent weeks and weeks learning about enclosure and the four-field rotation system FFS! We learnt about the Norman invasion of Britain and the sequence of events but somehow weren't taught:

• why Harald Hardrada invaded
• why Willam invaded
• why Harold engaged him at Battle
• what actually took place in the battle of Hastings
• about how William very nearly lost
• Saxon vs. Norman battle tactics

That pattern was repeated again and again; we had to memorise a sequence of events and dates but learnt nothing about the people, politics, emotions and happenings involved.

It was crap and a waste of time.

We had to learn about the current thinking, the reasons behind wars, how things stood for the common man. From a syllabus point of view, it was very good. Just not interesting.

I would much rather have had seperated Geography & History. My year was the first to go through the GSCE system right from the first year of secondary school and we had "Integrated Humanities" during which we did an entire term project on the Katyn Wood massacres of 1942, grew mushrooms for a term and went on a school trip to the British Museums "Live Trenches" exhibition.

As a result, I left school with almost no History education, no Geography education and no real idea of what I had missed. Incidentally we also did "Integrated Science" which was such an awful basis for A-Levels that I couldn't even balance a chemical equation when I started A-Level Chem.

Everything I've learnt since then has been off my own back, but I would have loved a more structured approach to learning important stuff.

Integrated science benefits no one. It does not teach enough of the subject for people to discover if they are vaguely interested at a higher level.

I dunno what happened to all the GCSE History peeps in this thread. Mine was virtually all 20th century. I wrote a major piece of coursework on how the Hawker Hurricane was instrumental to our victory in the Battle of Britain
We watched Schindler's List. We discussed communism, the cold war, the Balkans, 1st/2nd/3rd world and how the aftermath of WW2 globally influenced the world we live in today.

Not only was all that worth knowing, it was interesting. My mates doing Geography learnt about volcanoes, earthquakes and population demographics. They didn't have a clue about politics, the origin of countries, where things are on a map, how cultures are based on their surroundings or anything else useful/interesting.

I still think a combination of subjects would make for the most interesting course.

Same here, and I think that's the right balance. You can't make everything compulsory to exam level, but ensuring everyone has a basic grounding in things we consider "common knowledge" can be done at primary and junior levels.

At O level, we did Social and Economic history from 1720-1855. It was a narrow but fairly deep course giving a good view of life at the time. Of course, most of the boys were actually there to study the teacher's big bouncy boobies.