I'm not advocating that we drop subjects at all, only I know schools have limited times. In the UK things like sports, modern languages, practical skills lessons (woodwork, electronics, cooking, sewing...), drama and music are all culled so we can learn to write CVs and do team building exercises... I mean, come on! More literature would be great but we have to ask at what cost? Why can't parents do more at home? Or more to the point, why don't parents do more at home? For me to teach Chaucer (not a big fan either tbh) would be hard, to teach DS how to eat with a knife and fork is normal, not something he'd be learning at senior school!

So I read the initial article and thought "what do I do as a parent then?" then thought "I bet lessons will be cut for this and the children will enjoy themselves even less than they do now."

While it's a great idea to teach children to respond to others and have feelings and stuff, we also need to teach them stuff that they may never use again but at least they know how to use parts of their brain otherwise never accessed. I just don't want to see people saying "well, the world speaks English, let's drop the languages because we'll never use them" because that's really bad. And I learnt a bit of Latin and ancient Greek to help me with my science - yup, dead languages were useful! (I also continued with a little bit of study - oh, so poor are my skills but at least I tried - because I love how our language has grown and evolved and that was fun to see from the older languages.)

Maybe I'm pulling needless holes. But maybe we, as parents, need to act on this lack of knowledge in our children and see how we can support schools in this without losing other essential skills. If we drop maths then we will feel the loss - not today or tomorrow but certainly in 20 years' time - of mathematicians. We'll soon discover what they actually do all day if we deem them worthless now!