When I was first in school (I say first because I will probably be in school for the rest of my life taking college courses to increase my knowledge), a broad business course of study including macro and micro economics, accounting I,II, and III, and business management were a requirement for a degree. I've since learned that is not longer a requirement.


>>>I was amazed when I was in Germany, France, and Italy at the depth of knowledge the kids had in specific areas compared to those in the U.S. It is an obvious difference. Does it prepare the student more for life than an overall level of education would though? I'm not sure.
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>>Seems to me what they're doing in Bulgaria (and do in other countries as well) is viewing education as job training. I prefer to view it as life training, which means we need a broad base of knowledge. It's easy enough (in a relative sense) to learn what you need to know for a particular job, but to be an educated person, you need to know a lot more.
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>This is why I consider myself lucky to be born where I was, at the time when I was. The elementary school was quite thorough in broadening our horizons, which I can compare now with what our youngest is learning. With the high school, I had the best (and so did my wife, and did our oldest; our middle daughter had one year of it) - the gymnasium (aka grammar school). The orientation was minimal - there was the science-math direction, and humanities direction. The difference was only in the size of the curriculum - we had more math, physics, chemistry, astronomy, biology and even geography, while they had more of history, sociology, philosophy. Latin, logic, foreign language, PE, music, art - these were the same for both. The difference was maybe 15% of the curriculum, and we all got a vast base for future learning. And we learned to think.
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>When it came to enrolling into college, I wanted to make movies. I failed to get into the Movie Academy (renamed later into College of Drama Arts), and went by plan B, study maths.
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>Would I be able to do some work after high school? Surely I would. After such a training in general arts, it usually takes very little to learn anything new. It's been proven in practice - I've seen the college dropouts from my generation being bosses all over the place (once I had the companies they worked for as my customers), on jobs they never studied for. And they were doing fine.
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>And do I have to point out that the broad knowledge helps in programming? How is a programmer to understand the business rules of his customers if he knows only programming? How is he going to predict problems and circumvent them even before his application gets into them?
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>Now I'm not saying a grammar school is a solution for everybody. I'm just saying one should feel lucky having a chance to get broad education, and shouldn't miss that chance for the world.