Boogie-nicey,
I'd take exception to the comment about left-wing tendencies, but everyone here is more or less on the same track I think.
The reality for most kids though is that there are no jobs for them in technical fields. Aviation couldn't be a better example! Media studies, drama and a whole host of "modern" courses are actually relevent, especially if the intention is to give the majority of school leavers a tertiary education. Studing university level calculus, while important to an engineer, is utterly pointless to 99.9% of the population. While these new courses sound wishy-washy, you might find the course content is exceptionally difficult for the unitiated and do have some practical application..
As for applying the military model to day-to-day schooling; that's all well and good for a certain type of student, but not most. In fact military style learning would be undesireable and incompatible with most normal human beings. It is also a very uncritical style of learning. Having experienced the pitfuls of the Far East's attraction with rote learning and absolutely deferrence to hierarchy, I think it is something we could do without. This has had negative practical implications in a number of East Asian airlines CRM performance.