Well, I went to a school in the 70's where they dispensed with all that outdated stuff. We never did Shakespeare, or read classics. We did a lot of 'creative' poetry writing; we read science fiction, we read some other strange stuff. We did the "who to throw off the lifeboat" exercises over and over, studied communist countries, and the 'culture of poverty'. This was all supposed to prepare better for the real world than all those old, stale lessons that those older than us had. We never had to memorize math tables, never had grammar (we got brand new books in 5th grade, but never opened them). My understanding of history was woefully inadequate to put current events in any context (WWII was never mentioned in any of the years I was in school, because it wasn't 'current events', wasn't 'social studies' and wasn't far enough back to be history to any of my teachers).
Science worked out pretty well, as we did a combination of labs and studying the scientific method.
Foreign languages weren't required, but I was interested so I learned enough spanish and russian to understand the similarities in language. Incidentally, in Spanish class I learned english grammar.
In english I've found that there are often references to literature that I don't understand, having never read the books that most other people have. I learned to write on my own more than I did in english class, where we did more True-False and multiple choice exercises than we did actual paragraph writing.
In summary, as a student of the 70's in a college town, where we were the guinea pigs for many of the things you see in public schools today, I don't see them as that positive. I didn't get a great education (even though the school district then and now considers itself "world class"), but I did learn to read well enough to learn whatever I needed to catch up on for myself. Of course, that probably wasn't because of the 'whole language' reading we got. It's more because my older sister (having the older teachers who weren't trying all the latest methods) came home from school every day when I was 3 and 4 and had to play school, where she was the teacher and I learned to read and add...