Every school does that. All that says to me is "we're like every other school except we're all unattractive." Tell your sister to slap you for calling her ugly. Oh, and it also tells me you don't know what utilitarianism means.
Not in the UK, they don't. Well, I think every school in the world does to an extent of course, but generally the UK school system is very good at making sure to properly teach the subject, rather than just teaching to pass exams. It's much better than in many other countries, such as the US, where passing is generally considered to be more important than actually learning.
Umm...you know I live just outside of London right? They teach to a strict syllabus. Most questions were fobbed off as 'unnecessary,' we had no choice of what we could study, it was just stuff on the test. The only exception I had to that was a physics teacher but he would largely only help you with outside stuff on his own time, and most of the time it was just him lending me a book and telling me to ask him if I got stuck. The focus is very much on grades. Teachers get fired if they don't keep them up; Ofcom calls the school shit if they aren't teaching strictly to a set course established already. And I was hardly at a bad school, by most accounts it's one of the top three out of the more than the dozen or so in my area. I didn't get any freedom to explore the surrounding subject until university.
Or, really? I had it in my head that you were American for some reason - sorry.
They only teach stuff on the syllabus, of course - that's the whole point of having a syllabus. I was referring more to teaching the subjects covered by the syllabus properly, as opposed to just teaching how to pass the exam. Reading through the whole of Macbeth, teaching the background to the play, teaching how to analyse it and discuss it in detail, so that pupils learn everything on the syllabus thoroughly and can therefore pass exams by knowing everything - as opposed to just teaching how to write very specific formulaic essays on the couple of small bits of the play that are guaranteed to be tested, and leaving it at that.
Maybe your area was particularly bad for education - I went to a distinctly mediocre school, relative to others in the area (and that's only counting state education - none of the private schools, some of which are great), and they did a reasonable job of covering the subjects on the syllabus properly.
But yeah, we've probably derailed this thread far enough, so I'll stop this now 
Either there was inside information, or - as I suspect - they guessed what was probably was gonna be tested. My point is less that they taught you about Hamlet and more that you weren't free to explore Shakespeare in general and be tested on a play from a select group. The pick from a handful of questions each year, there's only a very limited number of things they have to teach, and in each case can mock exam you on every possibility. Think the poem anthology as a better example, lots of poems, any could be chosen; you had to know them all. That encourages open teaching, but one play? Nah. And for the record, I now have a love/hate relationship with Hamlet. After my GCSE, guess what? It was in my fucking A Level exam too. I've seen it 4 times, studied the minor characters of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, wrote an essay about a Japanese interpretation. Jesus, choose a different fucking play already... Or a better example, in university there would be topics we guessed might come up. Then they would throw in a final major question, a curveball that required you to understand two different topics, apply them both to a subject, come up with a logical conclusion and explain why. Even if you were wrong as hell if you explained your reasoning you got marks. Half my class failed their first year, largely because they memorised answers - as they had before - and never really understood a thing. A friend scraped a 2:2 memorising stuff. You learn or you fail. Schools never encourage this, my uni didn't really give a shit so long as they got paid. Very different emphasis.
And yes, I was mildly offended you thought me as a stupid American. No offence to the Americans. If you can understand this sentence you are exempt. "The percolation of a polymeric material as a result of an annealing process, ignoring the rheological implications, demonstrates the material properties in question."
