The Invented History of 'The Factory Model of Education'

Interesting, and worth considering. It still doesn't explain the dramatic lag between what work educated adults do versus what they're taught.

I graduated high schooll in 1979. The math curriculum consisted almost entirely of rote arithmetic learning, then some algebra, then very Euclidean geometry, them some trig and more algebra. All calculations done by hand. Laboriously. This utterly ignored the advent of calculators, and then computers. I ended up working as a stress analyst in defense industry, and I was never, ever without my trusty HP calculator, and withing arms length of a VT-100, with as much as a Cray-2 on the other end.

I see my kids doing somewhat different things, but there's still an emphasis on arithmetic. This utterly ignores the advent of MACSYMA, Octave, Matlab, Mathematica, etc, and the predominance of algorithms. None of that is even hinted at, even though they now use TI calculators in class.

There's something to be said for not slavishly following trends, but ignoring long-term secular changes is entirely without merit.