You're going to laugh at this, I'm sure... but I learned a lot more about the Greek pantheon, as well as the stories attached to them, from playing the God of War series of games than I ever did in class. All we ever did in class was go rapidly through a dry listing of Greek gods/goddesses, what they represented, and then moved on to the culture of the civilization itself.
I don't see anything wrong with this... Greek mythology is a fascinating subject, sure, but it's not exactly vital information. Schools cannot cover every piece of fiction that had some measure of influence on modern culture. They can tell you that it exists, but if you want to really know about it you have to look it up on your own.
The high school I went to offered Mythology classes as part of the elective courses. They were a lot of fun but predominantly attended by female students because the teacher who got the classes in in the first place, and taught them, was a feminist and fairly liberal. She had a giant poster on her door that proclaimed "HERstory" and depictions of strong women in literature.
While it was never part of the actual course work it wasn't uncommon to end up with a lecture on homosexuality's depiction then and now when talking The Epic of Gilgamesh. Or discussing the culture of rape when we learned about Medusa. Hell, she's the first person I ever heard discuss how Medea's children might have lost their citizenship and been sold as slaves if Jason divorced her and how it could be viewed as more a mother not wanting her children to suffer than petty revenge.
Oooh, Or the teacher who taught Gothic Lit and who would just smile, shake her head, and ask us to keep the discussions about necrophilia to a minimum.
There are some great teachers out there but they often get bushwhacked. The cool mythology teacher? A guy who graduated two years after I did told me she was fired. The Gothic Lit teacher who encouraged us to view Frankenstein without our initial prejudices to better understand the "monster's" plight? She would often be heard telling people that all teachers become either jaded or crazy within seven years because of what the system does to them. And when she said that she was normally referring to the first year science teacher who ran fundraisers so his top scoring class could go on a field trip to see the dissection labs at a college in the state capital. He believed that as long as a class was getting done and performing well we should be given the freedom to work in the manner that suited us best, i.e. sometimes visitors would walk in and find Ben sprawled out across the floor on his stomach because he claimed lying down was more conducive to his studies than sitting. Ben had the best marks in class, so he might have been on to something. But, yeah, do you think the students appreciated him for what he did? Nope. A good portion of the male students gave him as hard a time as they could because he was most likely gay. Who bloody cares about that? Teachers that don't slap you into detention for calling them Tony the Tiger get a free pass.
