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Comment by t6jvcereio | Hacker News Reader

Why are we teaching sums and multiplications? After all, computers can do that these days. /s

The complaint that we're teaching something that we never see in engineering, like homogeneous equations is preposterous. It's like saying why teach fractions when in engineering you always see reals. If you want more advanced differencing equations, you can do a more advanced course or self study more advanced material. I have a guy in my company who has a PhD in a very niche topic in differential equations and he can actually solve real world differential equations.

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Arguably the emphasis on fractions in primary education should have gone away as soon as calculators became common. They are pretty useless except in a few special cases.

Put another way: if we had had calculators all along, and someone had recently proposed teaching fractions as important ways to represent (some) real numbers, would that idea have gotten any traction at all in pedagogical circles? I don't see how.

Oh my. I'd rather tell myself that you're trolling, than lose my last scraps of faith in humanity.

What would be a good argument against the point that we wouldn't bother teaching fractions if calculators had always existed?

Math education is worse than religion when it comes to blind adherence to tradition. A lot of kids who learn calculus in high school should be learning statistics instead, for instance. And a lot of time in engineering school is wasted on worthless analytic techniques that should be spent on numerical methods that the student will actually use. Never mind the holy wars about how linear algebra should be taught. Compared to the ferocity of these debates, fractions seem like low-hanging fruit with few arguments in their defense.

Classroom time is limited, so we need to make every minute count.

> What would be a good argument against the point that we wouldn't bother teaching fractions if calculators had always existed?

Well perhaps the fact that we wouldn't know how to divide 1 unit into 3 equal parts?

And if you're going to respond that an approximation is always good enough "in engineering", how would you estimate the amount of error you're introducing if you don't know what fractions are?

> Math education is worse than religion

Another more recent religion is that of people who defend that you should only learn the narrow set of things that have immediate application in the work place (these people also forget that there's many different work places with different demands. These people normally have dumb jobs). If you learn only things that have evidence application, nothing new will ever be invented. Math education has a lot of problems, but learning fractions isn't one of them.

Learning LESS is never the answer. I'm being very honest with you when I say that someone arguing we shouldn't learn fractions might be the absolute dumbest thing I've ever read on HN.

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