What should be taught in Schools?

[jokerman]

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Essentially. Certain changes have been made but those are rather superficial.

It's a better situation than in the U.S., in my opinion, where we've cut out the meat of our education.

[jokerman]

You must be logged in to read this quote.

Essentially. Certain changes have been made but those are rather superficial.

It's a better situation than in the U.S., in my opinion, where we've cut out the meat of our education.

What meat would that be? What do you think Students should learn?

Basic literacy and arithmetic.  Teaching the fundamentals is eschewed in the majority of American schools, replaced with the teaching of "higher order" values.  Yet when it comes to understanding concepts of math, penetrating into the meaning behind works of writing, and even thinking outside the box on both of these matters (an ability claimed by some of our modern education experts to be stiffled by traditional learning techniques) I exceed the abilities of the vast majority of my fellow students.  I gained these abilities because in my early years my father frequently drilled me in reading through phonics and problems of addition, subraction, multiplication, and division without the use of a calculator (or use of pencil and paper, whenever possible). 

[jokerman]

The problem lies largely in the fact that the lives of most teenagers require little to no knowledge on anything an most are too dumb and/or short-sighted to care abuot the distant future, and hence uninterested in learning things. That is why drills and grades are needed to make kids emerge from their teens with at least some shreds of knowledge.

Now perhaps you're experience is different from mine but generally I find this not to be case, that most teenagers and young people are intellectually curious to a degree though that is mostly sucked out of kids during their early schooling for various reasons. Of course a commodity based culture which isn't based around the idea of knowledge hardly helps.

You're right that intellectual curiosity is present in all young people, however it's not the schools that suck it out of them.  It's the culture.