So how are you commenting on what’s included in the 2019 curriculum?
Ok.
I’m a useless dinosaur then. 
Most of my science knowledge is considered antiquated.
I’ll bow out and leave the thread to more recent college grads.
I thought the OP was asking for speculation and some interesting discussion. Compare memories of people from different decades in school.
Who else could accurately answer except older science teachers with long careers?
That’s not me. I did well in the science classes that I was required to take. I was not a science major.
So I’m out of here.
There may be a handful of experts here that can participate.
You weren’t “comparing memories.” You were making statements like “the basic science hasn’t changed,” without being familiar with the science in either 1959 or 2019.
You don’t have to be an expert to participate. You just have to know something about the history of the development of biological concepts. A number of posters have given good answers despite not being professionals for the past 60 years.
I didn’t intend to give that impression. I was only sharing my impressions of what I learned. I enjoyed science classes, they challenged me, and I’m glad that I was required to take them. Even if everything has changed.
Sorry for interrupting the thread.
Deleted. Tried to do a Google search, posted it as a comment.
In Spain, in 1959, Biology wasn’t a HS course.
At the time compulsory education stopped at 4th grade, 10yo for the majority of students. For those who stayed in school, then came the Basic Baccalaurate (until 8th grade, or age 14), which could be followed by entrance into certain professional schools (such as a Normal School, for teachers) or by the three years of the Superior Baccalaurate (until 11th grade, or age 17). The SB gave entrance to higher professional schools (such as the School of Commerce, for accountants, or the Navigators’ School, for marine merchant officers), or allowed one to attempt admission into university. Each university and “major” (we actually have no majors and minors, you had and have to pick an intended degree from day one) would have different requirements: some required only an SB, some required passing a specific entrance exam administered byt the specific university one intended to attend.
In 1970 the new Ley General de Educación upturned the whole system. Compulsory education (EGB) now started at age 5/6 and lasted for 8 grades, until age 14 (which was also the new age for becoming legally employed fulltime). At that point, students could move to Trade School or to a college-oriented High School (henceforth c-HS). EGB included Science subjects in grades 6th, 7th and 8th, all of which had some Biology; the first year of c-HS included Biology for all students (Trade students would get Biology if their degree was in Life Sciences; some Trade Schools would also require Biology for those with degrees in Physical Sciences). It was one of the few classes that were required to have labwork. c-HS was split into several “tracks”; you had to choose yours after 10th grade, and it would be the same for 11th grade (when you would get your BUP, Unified Baccalaurate) and 12th (University Orientation Course, COU). Students from the Life Sciences track would have Biochemistry in COU (the book they used was the same one I later used in the last year of ChemE, and was offered as part of Grad School Biochemistry I and Biochemistry II in the US).
University entrance exams got merged into Selectividad: Spain doesn’t have school districts, but it does have university districts. Each on the Universities that’s head of a district prepares and administers Selectividad in that district, but the results are valid for the whole country. All universities, all schools, all tracks and degrees must accept those grades as valid. A school can have its own entrance exam in lieu of Selectividad but this is very rare.
During this period, legal full-employment age shuffled up until 16. It was already 16 by the time I started HS, mid 1980s.
The educational system got changed again but it didn’t last very long (by the time the first students to start it entered college, there were several grades of younger students under the current system); then it got changed again, and now we’re under the system defined by 2013 LOMCE, called “the Wert law” because that’s the name of the minister who prepared it. Compulsory education has moved up to match the legal employment age, so it ends at 16 (ESO, Compulsory Secondary Education); the two years after that are all now Baccalaurates, something which still cracks electricians up no end (theirs is a Technical Bac (Electrician)). Biology is part of multiple Science classes beginning in 1st grade; whether you get it as a separate course or not depends on your track. First year of ESO for example (6th grade) includes “Biology and Geology”; OK, they’re still studying the same stuff I got as “6th grade Science” but with a more specific label. The organization of the tracks has changed; the way some stuff is taught has changed (for example, Chemistry is taught using wholly-systematic names, something no actual chemist really uses), but in the end the subjects and their content are very similar to what they were in 1989 and radically different from 1959. We now more about the different bodies that form a cell and what is taught in “the parts of a cell” is therefore somewhat different, but we’re still teaching a chapter called “the parts of a cell”.
Biology was harder for me simply because so much of it was just rote memorization of terms, which is tedious. Physics and chemistry involve more concepts, and thereby are more engaging, which makes it easier.
Depends on the person, and what’s taught; I can’t speak for 1959, but in my school in the '90s, I found biology far easier and more engaging, with plenty of interesting concepts, whereas chemistry involved far too much rote memorisation of names.
Dunno about physics, it was taught by an utter bitch in my school, but I think I would have enjoyed it if it was taught without the irrational screaming.
I’d be pretty pithed if they were going to dissect me alive, too.
I don’t remember much of biology lessons from the late 80s,to be honest. We dissected some eyeballs (cow, I think, they were certainly big enough) and giggled over pages 198-205 in the textbook.
My daughter is now 13, and knows a lot more biology than I do already.
Some discussion of old bio textbooks here:
Although from my cursory inspection, they are from earlier than when the OP asks.
Kids learn about all these organelles, but some, like the ribosome, weren’t described long before 1959, so are unlikely to have made it into textbooks by then. I can’t imagine a bio class before we had an even basic understanding of transcription and translation.
I work as a para in a high school. Some of the basics they’re teaching now about dna and genetics weren’t even discovered yet when I was in high school.
A few more changes in biology in the past 60 years:
In the 1960s genes were understood mainly in terms of the structural proteins they produced. Since then we have learned that many genes are regulatory in function rather than simply producing proteins.
Evolution was largely viewed as being gradualistic and to some extent deterministic. (I’m speaking of what got into high school or college textbooks.) Now the role of relatively sudden transitions (as in punctuated equilbria as described by Eldredge and Gould) and catastrophes (as in the asteroid impact at the KT junction) are given more consideration.
I took HS biology in 1951-52. The first term was botany and we mostly studied flowering plants. Learned about pistils and stamens and fertilization and the like. I think we talked about cells too, but not that much was known. I do remember something about meiosis and mitosis. A lot of time on evolution–Gregor Mendel and peas. Second term was zoology. We never dissected anything although one day the teacher passed out some pickled frogs and we looked at the superficial anatomy. At the end of the class, he collected the frogs again to use the following year. More on evolution. He had a large poster on the wall: “Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”, which he carefully explained meant that when you look at fetal development, it goes through stages that resemble fetuses of evolutionary predecessors. I think in this form, the slogan is mostly harmless.
But that was the last bio course I ever took, although I have kept pretty up to date on later developments. In the winter of 1956, Linus Pauling came to town and gave a talk at the Franklin Institute (in Philadelphia) on the double helix. Although he had been scooped, he fully recognized the importance of Watson-Crick.
In my basic biology class, the teacher pithed a frog and we saw that process, plus we were given snakes and sharks to dissect. Cats came in advanced biology. I remember the teacher had a 55-gallon drum of them and we were parsed out one from it. I remember it was a really large cat too. This was in the late 70s.
The thing I remember most from my advanced biology class was about human reproduction - everything that needs to happen biologically to make a human being once the sperm has been introduced to the system. I am still amazed anyone gets pregnant at all, considering all the things that have to happen at the right levels in the right sequence at the right time. And yet, it obviously works quite well!
The thing I am amazed about today is how little we still know about pregnancy itself, once egg meets sperm and all is well - particularly about the effects it has on women’s brains and bodies both during and afterward.
Wow, I keep forgetting just how much Spain has changed in the past few decades!
If you try to order preserved cat specimens from Carolina Biological Supply, you won’t get them for about a year; their supply is very backlogged. Don’t imagine their competitors will be able to supply cat specimens any faster, either. This is a good thing - the popularity of animal shelters moving to “no kill” has really taken off. Fetal pigs or rats are the mammal of choice where dissections need to be performed in North America (not sure if this is true in Europe or elsewhere,) and the increasing quality of digitally simulated dissections makes dissection less essential as a teaching tool, especially for students who would not be able to or want to perform a dissection in real life.