Do you think it would have been better if they spent all the time to go deeper with a single language? Apart from English, what language is the most relevant to learn?
I'm not sure what their thinking was, behind just having us sample the different languages, other than that we used the same brand of textbooks for each of them, so I suppose one could compare one textbook to another and see pretty easily how the languages were similar and how they were different. They were trying to teach how the languages were interrelated and how the families of languages worked. We had a chance to look into some obscure languages like Gaelic too.
That school was really big on glorifying the British, so they taught French from pre-kindergarten, taught English two periods a day from K-12, and then Latin from 7th grade on. So those were all the languages spoken in the UK, from the days of the Romans, to the Norman Conquest, etc.
I thought the science and tech curriculum there was a bit weak, but that was probably because the school was poor and couldn't afford any equipment (there had been a schism that resulted in half the school splitting off to form a separate school; and that half was in control of most of the assets like computers and books and whatnot, so they basically stripped the place bare when they left; it was like an ugly divorce).
I think they also had a philosophy that the first priority is getting a country's culture right, and getting people to recognize their place in it; and then stuff like technological achievement will come naturally after that.
