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Comment by marcus_holmes | Hacker News Reader

Basic arithmetic and calculators.

I'm old: when I went to school we weren't allowed calculators "because there'll be a situation where you need to do basic arithmetic and don't have a calculator". I occasionally laugh at this while firing up the calculator app on my phone. We'd have been better off if they'd taught us sign language rather than arithmetic.

Our education system is going to have to adjust to the new reality. Setting an essay task is now the equivalent of learning the times table - utterly redundant (unless you plan on a career writing essays or doing maths).

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That may be the strawman, but that's not the real reason why people ban calculators when you learn arithmetic. The reason is because learning to manipulate numbers in your head abstracts to other things, like learning to estimate and learning to manipulate equations.

Higher-level math classes usually encourage calculators, and graduate-level math classes will often allow Matlab or Mathematica, as long as you can write a short sentence explaining what the computer algebra system is doing. Where I went to school, this was colloquially called "proof by Steven (Wolfram)."

It is a strawman. But I wonder how much better we'd be able to do those other things if we'd been taught to do them with calculators as a tool instead of being forced to do the basic arithmetic in our heads.

If you look at the natural experiment on that in society right now, much worse.

Many people today do math only with a calculator and correspondingly lack any sort of numerical reasoning skills whatsoever, despite having learned both mental math and numerical reasoning in school. That growth of innumeracy coincides with the rise of calculators and computers who do it for you.

Also, students are taught in more advanced classes to use calculators (and later computer algebra systems) as a tool. This comes after they have learned the basics, not as a replacement for the basics.

Writing (hello ChatGPT) and math are like muscles: use it or lose it. If you can't do the basic versions, you can't do the harder stuff either.