Right--I sincerely doubt that public school children, or private school for that matter, are learning about fundamentals vs. overtones. And if they are, I want to find out where so I can make a donation. But I suspect 2bad was kidding.
Actually, no, it really is part of the non-elective curriculum for 9th Grade here. Although just like in the US Education is Provincial Jurisdiction, so might be different elsewhere.
It's essentially a "music appreciation" class, not for musicians specifically, but it covers the math relationship, tone relationship of instruments, song composition, lyrics as modern poetry, musical genres, that kind of thing. For playing instruments you would take "Band" which is an elective, although I seem to recall having recorders (the instrument) being passed around at some point. It was an easy class, fun even.
Very few private schools in Canada, especially K-12; a few military ones. But we also fund alternate schools via Education Taxes (part of your Property Tax assessment); you denote what school system you want to support when you pay those, although if you don't denote one, it will default to the Public system.
The significance of that is, the taxpayer and whether you have any children in any given system are not tied together; you support a system and that's that. However the tax rate will be set by the School Board you support, so your Property Taxes will vary based on that. In practice there isn't much difference, a few %, but that's how it's administered.
Everybody takes a standard curriculum and then the school can teach it's unique classes, some of which count as credit since some electives are required to pass a grade. Seven full class credits are mandatory to complete a grade, most students will take eight, there is barely room for nine but you can do it if you're a keener.*
Mostly alternate language schools (you can take French, Cree or Ukrainian immersion here, no English instruction after the third grade, K-8) and religious schools (Catholic, which is huge, about 35% of students overall, K-12), Mennonite (K-8), not sure about which others.
There is a lot of leeway with regard to electives a school can teach, as long as you are learning *something* the Province will probably allow at least a half credit. At my HS we had a work experience class for 11 & 12, half credit, friday afternoons. You could make an arrangement with almost any business that could teach a skill, go there on your friday afternoon, get a half credit.
* Two English, one Math, one Science, History and PhysEd are mandatory (5 credits; no credit for PhysEd, which was a simple Pass/Fail and some had medical waivers. You failed PhysEd by not showing up for class, which you can't get away with for long anyway, unless you decided to do a year's worth of detention instead). A second Math, two more Sciences plus various electives fill out the minimum 7 credit load. I took everything except Biology and had French and Shop (mostly woodworking) as electives (9 credits).
In College when I went a second language was still mandatory to graduate, not required anymore. I had to take the "hard" French class because i took it in HS, one of those things where if I knew better, I wouldn't have bothered with HS French and just took the equivalent in University.
Later on in my rookie year when it was too late to change, I met a guy, he was the drummer from Sweeny Todd ("Roxy Roller"), we became buddys and he was taking Mandarin Chinese. Hot Tip: world's easiest college credit aside from basket weaving; all he did was look up characters in a book and wrote them down. Even the Prof mostly just looked up characters in a book and wrote them on a projector. Open book exams. D'oh!
