What should be taught in Schools?

[Citizen James]

So, what you're saying is that Ireland (or at least your part of it) is stuck in the old "factory" model of schooling.  Students are assumed to be Tabla Rasa and passively absorb knowledge.

Not that that isn't all that uncommon in the states either, but some know better.  current educational theory involves encouraging student to make connections between prior knowledge and new knowledge.

In my own field of math there is a very lively debate going on as to whether there should be real world examples and a connection between an intuitive understanding of concepts; or whether the old fashioned way of drill and kill is more useful and less frivolous.   A subset of that is the usage of calculators and whether they are a tool for which students (which have already passed basic math) can bypass strenuous number crunching in favor of higher concepts.  (for example, in the graphing of quadratic functions).

I am also very much a fan of a (revised) Socratic method.  There are still key concepts that need to be covered, but real learning is an active process - students need to figure stuff out for themselves, with teachers as guides to help them along and give them a hand rather than shovel information as though students were an empty glass to be filled.

I hated history until college, where it was finally presented as a flow - a give and take of various socio political forces, rather than just a bunch of random dates and events.