I see a lot more value in poetry than just letting feelings out. Learning about poetry written by the great poets can also provide a rich history lesson, as can literature studies, and in this was poetry appreciation increases. Even humble Australian literature furnished me with a better understanding of our history as a country than the pathetic curriculum of Australian Studies and lower school history ever did at school.
But, you know, if these things are going to interest you, then they'll still be there after school! DP was labelled and canned at school as a 'failure', so his formal learning is not remembered with any fondness...until he went to a village school that let him learn what interested him! And he may not have learned about a lot of 'essential' things at school, yet it doesn't stop him from learning about it now. The village school taught him how to follow up his interests, even if it didn't introduce him to all his potential interests in those short years. He now has a great appreciation of ****ens, railway history, chemistry, horticulture, politics (you'd never know by looking at him on the street between Monday and Friday) and even art. Being pushed these things at school would have finished them off for him - he'd never have looked at them again. I even now have him appreciating the contribution of the Bronte sisters, and he's versed with Patrick White and Peter Carey. I think a solid foundation in learning HOW to learn is more important than cramming traditionally 'important' subjects into kids.
I do agree that communication teaching needs huge improvement. Kids these days have very little appreciation of proper sentence structure and this will affect how they learn other languages...and increasingly important reality in a globalised and intercultural world. Language is probably one of the most important things to teach in schools because that is the interface for learning.
Language conveys what it is we need kids to know. It strikes me that even spending more time fleshing out the lessons in literature could address a lot of what this guy is saying. Relationships and intimacy? Literature. Communication and people skills? Literature. You got a life lesson you want to teach a child? Someone, somewhere, has written about it!
I'm glad my DS has a pretty good balance of both worlds. DP lives by his hands and still has time for more abstract ideas, and I live by my head and can apply myself practically where applicable. He can model both of these. A lot of kids are not so lucky in this respect. Also, there are parents who do not WANT to take on responsibility and will expect schools to teach their kids things like life skills. What do we do with those kids? Leave them in limbo so that they can screw up their lives royally and pass their ill-education onto their kids? There is a place for this kind of teaching philosophy and it would be nice if it were accessible to kids who really need it. But we all know that the kids who really need things rarely get them without a lot of toil and tears on the behalf of enlightened individuals.
My nieces and nephews will get a second-rate education because their parents can't afford to pay for schooling (well, that's debateable, but they have decided that paying for education is not on their priority list), and they are brilliantly smart kids. They will have some street smarts because their parents have lived hard and fast at times. They have the aptitude for more than this, yet through no choice of their own, they will find it an uphill battle to access learning of the finer things that could furnish their minds in a formal education setting.
There are still two tiers to this world. Have and have not.