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Comment by currymj | Hacker News Reader

You can imagine the following perspective:

- Most people don't need to learn calculus at all, and it's fine if the few weird students who do start when they get to college (maybe the advanced students can learn single-variable calculus in high school).

- For pure signaling reasons, taking calculus in high school has become very important for college admissions.

- In order to take calculus in high school, you need to at least take algebra I (and hopefully geometry) in middle school. Wealthier parents understand they are playing the college admissions game early on, so they make sure in elementary school that their kids will be able to get on the algebra track in middle school.

- Getting on the algebra track is thus the first really consequential part of the college admissions game, it happens much earlier than the rest, and takes real scheming by parents to make sure their young kids are prepared. [actually true]

- If you could just make this impossible, it will even the playing field in a huge way and knock down one of the biggest hurdles in college admissions for people from lower-SES backgrounds. [also probably true]

- The only downside is that students will no longer have time to cover calculus in high school, which doesn't matter anyway because it's only a small number of unusual people who need to learn calculus (very advanced math!), and they can just learn it in college.

This is my best guess about the line of thinking that motivates these "no advanced math" policies. It has elements of truth to it which are worth paying attention to. The problem is just that actually, it's really useful and important to learn calculus in high school, and more people need this opportunity.

edit: I thought it was clear that I think a lot more high school students should be learning calculus as early as possible, and that "no advanced math" is a terrible policy, but I guess not...

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With that kind of thinking though we can reach logical results like:

- writing prose and composition is unnecessary, as at best one will write on slack and social media;

- doing pushups, calisthenics, or running is unnecessary: few jobs require that;

- learning about how the government works, civics or sociology or psychology should be skipped: all these are taken care by the employer that is not going to let you go vote anyways (still don't understand how/why it is not a mandatory holiday, but what do I know);

- debates should be banned: promotes arguing against cops and employers both having detrimental outcomes;

- art is for the rich and private schools: poor populous should not be dreaming;

I suggest -- my 2 humble cents -- the writers of this abomination take a class in logic. Unfortunately, that is math and requires fundamentals they don't want covered.

P.S. My grad school anecdote: our perception and experiences as "international" grad students of the math understanding of incoming undergrads was abysmal to put it lightly. I don't want to be in any future TA shoes.

I don’t see how that is a logical conclusion. There’s such a thing as opportunity cost and interests. If someone wants to learn something, they should, but the problem is forcing those to learn something when they would rather learn something else. There are basic things that everyone should know, like reading. Instead of calculus, logic would be better, and especially probability and statistics.

I agree. Though I loved calculus (and took it in HS and college) my brother hated math in general and forcing him to take it or other advanved math class and get a bad grade is unfair.

Probability and stats requires calculus

It doesn’t, especially at the introductory level. Sure, at a certain point, it would be needed, but that would be for someone wanting to become a statistician, not the general population.

To be fair to the above poster: probability and statistics definitely does need calculus and other math beyond an introductory level. And you see that gap when you read social sciences work applying statistics and making rudimentary, and requiring insight otherwise, mistakes.

Beyond introductory level both probability and statistics have a lot of "counterintuitive" pre-probability and statistics results, that also explain a lot of the misconceptions the public faces in not understanding the notions.

Probability and statistics are topics that our democracies would be better of if people understood them: then they would understand perhaps topics like polling, and we wouldn't perhaps have misuse of the topics in Court like Sally Clark's case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sally_Clark

[But I guess we would have to drop lotteries as a taxation system also. [/s]]

Essentially what I am saying is suppose the politicians' reasoning, that @currymj suspects and offered above, and I agree with them is the likely one, was to be true.

Then the word calculus (and university admission perhaps with other goals in life) can be treated as variable(s). There is no inherent reason the set of deduction rules are dependent on the choice of topic. Let us denote the reasoning for brevity as a proposition p(s, g) with s\in Subjects g \in Goals:

Start substituting other subjects in there. Their reasoning goes that for an s \in Subjects to be in AcceptedSubjects \subset Subjects it must hold that:

p(s,g):=\(For the majority of students), \exists g \in Goals: p'(s,g). Where p(s,g) relaxes also the goal here -- doesn't have to be college admissions. Then start adding art, debates, writing and other topics I mentioned.

>but the problem is forcing those to learn something when they would rather learn something else.

so, most of my high school classes? I'm not against a more customizable high school experience, but that seems like a harder sell than trying to convince these boards why this initiative is a horrible idea.

>Sure, at a certain point, it would be needed, but that would be for someone wanting to become a statistician, not the general population.

Depends, I guess. Physics has the same issue. Where introductory physics can be taught with formulas, AP physics expects you to understand the calculus behind the formulas and not simply spout out random factoids. There's no particularly best approach here.

>This is my best guess about the line of thinking that motivates these "no advanced math" policies.

You've explained the thought process of the "reformers" fairly well, but there is another additional element that's important as well: a sizeable contingent of people believe that advanced math itself is intrinsically bad or negative. Usually this is either because math is fundamentally exclusionary in some core way, or because it's somehow inextricably tied to ways in which equity-seeking populations are oppressed, or used as a tool of oppression.

O'Neill's Weapons of Math Destruction is so popular in academic circles partly because it plays to this mindset.

This viewpoint dovetails with some of the points you've highlighted, for example many believe that everyone is equally capable, but the reason they're not all getting competitive scores with good shots at college is because advanced math (being intrinsically negative/evil) is ruining it. So in their view it is rational to get rid of it, replacing it with something (the data science course) that's not advanced math.

For these people, the goal is not to improve equity by getting everyone up to speed in advanced math. It's to bypass it.

At it's very foundation liberal ideology cracks pretty badly if "Everyone is born equally capable" is false.

But the only way to make people equal is to sabotage, sabotage and sabotage. And, of course, if parents have the means, this won't work. This is just robbing a lot of lower class kids from any chance of getting higher, just because not everyone will make it.

That's stupid.

Of course sabotaging kids is also slightly cheaper, and creates the need for more administrators, the ones making these decisions, to decide exactly what is "equitable".

I suspect that 'liberals believe "Everyone is born equally capable"' is a strawman. I hang out with pretty liberal people and no one actually believes anything like this. Interestingly, the article actually lists out a more nuanced, realistic version of this idea (with a link to research):

> But whatever you think about the morality of this idea, it simply will not work. The reason is that the strong hereditarian hypothesis is wrong; practically all kids are educable, with the proper investment of resources.

And we're talking about high school educational attainment here, not world-class achievement. To use a fitness analogy, not everyone has the anatomy to be a world-class deadlifter. But pretty much everybody can get to deadlifting 1x/1.5x their (healthy) bodyweight with some training.

> I hang out with pretty liberal people and no one actually believes anything like this

There is a broad streak of illiberality running through left-leaning Americans who call themselves liberal. At its core liberalism maintains not that everyone is equal in every way, but that virtually everyone is equally capable of flourishing if given the same opportunities.

Liberalism must believe that since its unit of measure is the individual, not a faction or state.

If someone who calls there’ themselves liberal doesn’t believe that I’d like to know what they think liberalism is.

Usually no liberals actually will echo that line, or even are aware of it. But the very philosophy dictates that it must be true. And ask them the difference between a checkout clerk and an MIT grad, and they'll tell you it was all about opportunity.

It's also why liberals have a very strong anti-science approach to fields like behavioral genetics, while falling over themselves to praise the social sciences.

The entire point of liberal ideology is to gather a variety of viewpoints because we accept that everyone is not born equal. That doesn't make some people better than others, they just bring different skills to the table.

No, we accept that everyone is born without equal opportunity. Its a key difference.

> the reason they're not all getting competitive scores with good shots at college is because advanced math (being intrinsically negative/evil) is ruining it

I ... I don't understand. This is literally the craziest conspiracy theory I've ever heard. Here's the thing: if a shadow cabal of lizard-people were actually using space lasers to mind control everyone into thinking the Earth is round so we never discover their hidden evil lairs at the edges of the flat Earth, or what have you ... if any those wacko theories were actually true, it would actually represent a terrible evil that humanity should fight to overcome. Such a plot might even make a decent movie. But this? Advanced math? What? Math is conspiring against humanity? I cannot even fathom a B-movie plotline where that holds together at all. No suspension of disbelief makes this make any sense. Math!?

I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic or not, but the objections are not typically phrased in the type of language you're using.

A typical example is something like this, from Louie (J.Res.Math.Ed. 2017):

>Through the lens of the culture of exclusion, students who appear mathematically gifted are viewed as intelligent, whereas others are myopically perceived as “slow,” “remedial,” and “special needs.” These perceived differences are used to justify stratification such that the culture of exclusion in mathematics education shapes access to intellectually stimulating learning opportunities, prestigious educational programs, lucrative careers, and high-status identities. Furthermore, because ability categories are mapped onto other socially constructed categories, the culture of exclusion is both a product of and a tool for the maintenance of racial, gender, linguistic, economic, and other hierarchies.

It is at its core a form of anti-intellectualism, that is true, but often emanating from other intellectual ideas from the academy.

Okay, have these guys seen how people who are really good at football are treated? And all those guys who are great at guitar keep getting all the chicks, goddammit!

There's no reason to think that mathematics has any more of a "culture of exclusion" than any other field of study, vocation, or sport.

Sounds like a classic case of bullying tactics in picking soft targets.

Well, haven't you noticed how the DIE cult is already all over entertainment? Sports teams kneeling down because of "oppression" and pop culture being absolutely dominated by sex and violence propaganda? Specially those being produced targeting the "minorities".

It's a brave new world.

I don’t know. I have met plenty of people during my life who didn’t like math. Would they vote to remove Calculus from high school curriculums, if they believed it would level the playing field? Yes, and without blinking.

>> Such a plot may even make a decent movie.

A “plausible” one, yes. Incidentally, have you noted how movies don’t ever have any actual hard science, and they never require mathematical thinking on their viewership? The same can be said about fiction in general. I bet our culture-makers would vote in-masse to suppress math from whatever curriculum they could.

> movies don’t ever have any actual hard science, and they never require mathematical thinking on their viewership

Um, no, I haven't noticed that. In fact I've seen "this movie is based on hard science!" as being a generally positive selling point for movies, especially sci-fi. I also don't really understand your point: movies and pop novels generally do well when they require very little thinking of any kind. They don't require musical thinking or spatio-temporal thinking or logical thinking or kinesthetic thinking or intrapersonal thinking either. Nor do most of our passtimes. That does not make them anti-intellectual.

> our culture-makers

Who?

There is a world of difference between a selling point and the actual thing, but I would be delighted to be proven that there are movies where the viewership requires hard science to understand the plot.

> that does not make them anti-intellectual

Math is old, and therefore, a vital aspect of human culture. By purposefully producing something that “does better” by excluding math, we are effectively doing our darn best to push math out of our collective thought. If doesn’t matter if we call that “anti-intellectual” or “junk-food-for-the-mind.”

> By purposefully producing something that “does better” by excluding math, we are effectively doing our darn best to push math out of our collective thought.

Strongly disagree, and in fact imo movies that are "junk food for the mind" serve a valuable purpose. The mind requires rest in order to digest new information, and so if we were constantly being reminded to "remember your math!" it would likely become very fatiguing very quickly. Being able to disconnect while still being entertained effectively allows your mind to rest. It's not as good as sleep, but it's better than never stepping away from your math homework to allow it to sink in.

There is a way to have time to cover Calculus in high school while still taking it slower: Block scheduling.

My high school shifted to it. It's like a college day where you have four longer classes instead of eight shorter ones. Courses are semester-long, not year-long. This means you can take two math classes in one year (algebra in the fall and geometry in the spring).

This also enabled my high school to offer AP Calculus B, which is part-two of AP Calculus.

The other advantage of this type of schedule is that it is also easier to offer other kinds of math that may be more critical to most students, such as a dedicated class on statistics.

My Toronto high school was like this, back in the early 2000s.

My Colorado high school was also like this, same time frame.

Eight different classes in one day? How can that work?

When I was in high school, IIRC we did 55 minute classes with 5 minutes between classes, 4 core classes 2 or 3 electives + lunch. It doesn't work, by time you start, the class settles, late arrivals show up, homework is collected, questions asked and whatnot, there's probably only 30 mins of real instruction. Class would boil down to either teaching or worksheets but not both.

Yes, this is the rub, it's not very efficient. For deeper activities, block scheduling is radically superior. Hell gym is way better too!

So my school did block schedule of 90 minutes classes on alternating days. But I am wondering if 30 minutes of instruction is about right?

I mean a lot of evidence point to people having difficulty focusing on a single thing or learning for more than 20 minutes at a time? 30 minute bite-sized lessons might be perfect.

Not well.

Our school district has a program where teenagers can elect to go to high school at a local community college. Depending on their aptitude going on, the program starts them off on high-school level classes and moves them up to college-level classes as the semesters go on, and all of this happens on a real college campus with a real college workload and schedule. The idea is that the kids aim to graduate with at least an associates degree.

Poor grades and trouble-making will get you kicked out of the program, so the only kids that are there are the ones who WANT to be there, which is a drastic contrast to actual high school.

Our daughter will be attending this school in the fall, we are all very excited about it.

My HS one of the first to have block scheduling. I would say the only negative about it was the AP/IB exams were held in early May. The high school year ended early June. So, there was a mad scramble to cram for the AP classes you took in the fall and a scramble to cover topics in 4 months instead of 5 (80% of a normal semester) for the spring semester.

If I could do it again I probably would have focused on getting the required classes out the way in the fall and focus on the AP in the spring to prepare for the exam in May.

That's what my high school did. 4 block periods per day. We had "A" days and "B" days. A days were 1st, 3, 5th, and 7th period. B days were 2nd, 4th, 6th, and 8th period. I never had two math classes in the same semester though.

Students from the rest of the world learn calculus when they 15-18.

It’s interesting to see how quickly America is being dumbed down by stupid policies.

College level science and engineering education doesn’t make sense without a understanding of at least basic calculus.

Not really.

Students in other countries in the world (for this assumption India, China, Canada, UK, Germany given my experience with the following) are tracked and/or calculus is optional.

We've traditionally had tracking within the US system (hence why AP and Honors classes matter) which helped filter students accordingly.

The issue is our "Hail Mary" pipeline - community colleges - are unnecessarily viewed as negatively, even though they help students remediate any knowledge gaps they might have.

‘Tracked’ is doing some heavy lifting here. A vast majority of students in these countries end up learning calculus in school to keep college options open.

Most students in these countries don't end up college track.

1. College Matriculation rates are low. Only 36% of Germans aged 25-46 have attended Tertiary Education (University as well as Vocational School) [0]. This is a similar story in the UK and Canada as well.

2. In countries like Germany and UK, college track HS admissions are competitive. Attending a Gymnasium or a uni track independent school or public school requires having a mix of high scores in grades 6-8 or competitive exams.

3. Calculus is not in the default curriculum. For example, in Canada Advanced Functions only teaches a bit of Calculus for a semester. The course is optional, only allowed at Grade 12, and sometimes isn't offered in HS. This is a similar case in the UK with "Further Maths" as an optional A-level and Germany with the Maths curriculum in Realschules.

[0] - https://gpseducation.oecd.org/CountryProfile?primaryCountry=...

I see India and China missing from your rebuttal, that is close to half of the worlds population and likely more than 2/3rds of all students who go to college.

Because for this conversation, I felt like talking about comparable first world countries and explaining the Chinese and Indian education system to a (fellow) American is annoying and tiring.

Points 1-3 are the same for India and China as well.

In China, Gaokao (college admissions exam) is only allowed to those who attend College Track high schools (Sr Secondary School).

To enter a Sr Secondary School (10-12) in China, you need to pass the Zhongkao, which is de facto limited to the top 40% scorers of the exam.

Zhongkao is not mandatory btw, and a number of (often rural or migrant) students end up failing to take the exam.

If you don't pass the Zhongkao, your options are either expensive private schools or going to a vocational school which will technically count as a tertiary program by giving a diploma and an extra year, but doesn't include as rigorous STEM classes as the Sr Secondary Schools.

This is similar to India as well, where Calculus isn't introduced in the CBSE or a number of State Board Exams. ICSE introduces Calculus at Grade 12, but ICSE is limited to elite private schools and elite/competitive public schools.

In both India and China, Tertiary education is low (it's difficult to get exact statistics as both countries have now begun obfuscating tertiary level with vocational programs). That said, given the Gaokao filtering, it probably doesn't exceed 30% in China, and India is most likely half of that given the 15-20 year head start China had on India.

Are you just making this up as you type?

Here's the curriculum for CBSE. https://cbseacademic.nic.in/web_material/CurriculumMain24/Sr...

Most state boards are similar to this.

Similarly most Chinese students end up learning calculus in school.

CBSE is literally just the limits and basic derivatives. It's literally Pre-Calculus as it is taught here in the California (Pre-Calculus with Limits, Ron Larson).

With the Chinese curriculum, same story if not at a Sr Secondary School. Here's the curriculum for the Secondary Vocational Schools (aka the schools most Chinese students end up attending) - http://www.moe.gov.cn/jyb_xxgk/s5743/s5744/A07/202001/W02020...

Notice how it caps at permutations.

> That said, given the Gaokao filtering, it probably doesn't exceed 30% in China

* Zhongkao Filtering, not Gaokao filtering

Also the Zhongkao IS mandatory, but heavily limits admissions into Sr High School (college track) Programs

Also, since 2022, Senior Vocational School students can now take the Gaokao, but given the curriculum in a Sr Vocational School as shown below, it's highly unlikely they'd meet the scores required to get into a university in China.

> College level science and engineering education doesn’t make sense without a understanding of at least basic calculus.

That doesn't actually mean that you need to cover calculus in high school. The calculus needed for the first year of college science and engineering can be easily taught early in the first year in the classes that need it.

That's how it worked at Caltech when I was a student (late '70s and early '80s). Around 75% of an incoming class had no calculus. It only took a lecture or two in Phys 1 to cover all the calculus that would be needed for the rest of first year science and engineering.

That calculus taught in Phys 1 wasn't rigorous and proof based, but high school calculus usually isn't either. By second year everyone had a year of Ma 1, which was rigorous and proof based calculus.

You need some time for the insights from new topics to become ingrained.

For computer science, imagine learning about logic gates and VLSI in the same year.

I’m curious as to how calculus is used in those fields. I got a degree in CS and we had to take a bunch of calculus classes but never used it in any of our CS classes and in my 20+ years of programming jobs I’ve never had to use it. Any time in my professional career that I needed math I didn’t know I learned just enough of it to solve my problem and promptly forgot it. I absolutely could not tell you how to mechanically do stuff to derivatives and integrals.

This question is relevant to me because we are deciding what to teach our kids and I haven’t yet been able to come up with a good argument for why to spend time gaining the skill of pen and paper mechanical calculus algorithms.

Are there professional scientists or engineers out there that do calculus on paper?

>Are there professional scientists or engineers out there that do calculus on paper?

Yes.

You've gotten a whole lot of replies that seem to miss your point, but I'd say that I've experienced that exact thing - to get to Calc in your senior year you needed to have gotten on a very specific track of math courses back in middle school, and likely your parents needed to know about it to make sure you got in. Otherwise, what appeared to be a very inconsequential choice at middle school actually decided your entire math track. Getting back on the track after you get off basically doesn't happen.

I definitely think we should teach more advanced math (and other) courses, but that particular way of doing it is just not very good - plenty of people who probably could have managed Calc just fine didn't get to take it, due to choices made for them years past probably by parents who didn't understand the significance. The structure and order of classes needs to be redone, which is hard.

I will say though I find it funny how much people are coming to Calc's defense. I'm in software development and it's a pretty common joke how virtually inapplicable calc is to us. I'm still happy I learned it but for software development it's definitely less useful than the other advanced math you'll learn.

I like to call it "the math ladder" for this reason. Math is uniquely cumulative, so being shoved off the ladder prematurely precludes future advancement in a way that gaps in knowledge of the US Civil War have minimal impact on learning East Asian history.

> it's a pretty common joke how virtually inapplicable calc is to us

If you think calculus is not important to software development than you are not bothering to look. Just a few examples:

- Calculus was the first math class I took that gave a clear definition of what a "function" really is. Do you use functions?

- Analyzing the properties of functions to see what operations made sense to do or not (e.g. continuous vs discontinuous).

- The concept of taking a function at various points and adding a small value to it to see how it changes is extremely important in sensitivity analysis and optimization.

- Anything involving non-uniform probability distributions, like sampling a random number from various distributions, requires understanding the relationship of PDFs and CDFs, which is one of derivative/definite integral. This means any form of realistic simulation, any estimations of time to failure, performance of anything, etc.

- Gradient descent and backpropagation in neural networks are completely opaque if you don't understand derivatives.

- Most games or simulations deal with rates of change.

- The concept of infinitesimals applies to finding tangents to curves, showing up in vector graphics all the time.

- Anything involving elevation in GIS, analysis of water flow, even topographic maps

I'm honestly sick and tired of seeing these crazy anti-learning comments like "I'm in software development and I literally never use calculus / linear algebra / type theory / lambda calculus / algorithms and data structures / boolean logic / binary trees / linked lists / stacks / queues / geometry / algebra / arithmetic" <-- then you're artificially limiting yourself and you're a much worse software developer than the ones who actually do use those things. What do you do all day, copy code from StackOverflow and hope it works? Don't discourage other people from learning just because you were too lazy: in fact that's literally what this entire post is about. You're part of the problem.

I definitely benefit from knowing calculus. But I always disliked it, it was taught in such a mechanical fashion.

I only really started to get math when I learned about linear algebra, combinatorics, proofs, A&D, algebraic structures, mathematical logic etc. And quite frankly those topics helped me much, much more than calculus.

> Do you use functions?

Unless you're using Haskell or something similar, mathematical functions and what most programming languages call "functions" are very different and are better referred to as procedures. Mathematical functions don't have any concept of some basic constructs like variables (state in general), I/O, or even sequential computation. Pure functional languages have to use things like monads to model procedures.

Sure, but you know what has state? ODEs and their discrete-time analogue, recurrence relations. You first meet ODEs in calculus. Even if you say “who cares about continuous time, my computer is fundamentally discrete!” you won’t have a concept of limiting behaviors without calculus.

> I'm honestly sick and tired of seeing these crazy anti-learning comments

I don't know why you're mad at me, I _literally said_ "I'm still happy I learned it", along with saying we should be teaching more advanced math. I said it was a common _joke_, not that we literally never use it. I went on to say it was "less useful" than other math you'll learn, not "not useful at all". Perhaps you should read the whole comment before getting so angry.

And no, just because I don't use calculus all day doesn't mean I "copy code from StackOverflow", I honestly don't know how you could come to such a silly conclusion (or how you think knowledge of calculus is necessary to understand most data structures). Do you think self-taught developers who never learned calculus are just incapable of learning or using data structures and algorithms, and don't know what functions are? I can tell you quite confidently that they can and do, because I know many of them.

I think learning other areas of math would better serve most people. I think logic and probability then maybe combinatorics and statistics would be much better than calculus and especially trigonometry.

> If you think calculus is not important to software development than you are not bothering to look. Just a few examples:

Half of what you listed isn't really Calculus at all: for comparison my highschool taught functions, continuous vs discontinuous, rates of change, and topographic maps in Math classes which happened years before taking Calculus. Then the Calc class was like 70% memorizing "whats the integral of cosecant?", was which I think we should be able to agree is absurdly useless even for people who actively work in a math-heavy field.

I suspect this form of calculus is what people are responding to when they say calc is useless; they should be teaching the things you're saying (including how to think about functions) and e.g. introducing Euler's method getting into what happens when your step size become arbitrarily small are all useful things to a broader set of people, but the actual implementation of Calculus classes in practice is instead entirely useless trivia that provides almost no insights if you wanted to do any of the things in your comment.

(A) problem is that, if you're going to start getting very specific about what math kids need to learn if they're not going into STEM, you end up with a pretty short list and you end up, in practice, with not really learning math or developing numerical intuition at all. (And let's ignore the fact that I directly used very little of what I learned in university engineering either.)

When was the last time I did a geometry proof? Used trig? OK, I use some algebra now and then though probably not simultaneous equations. Not calc.

But I'm pretty sure the path is not to make numerical literacy basically optional. Why know how to multiply in a world with calculators? Well... Though I wouldn't argue with more emphasis on things like basic stats and probability early on.

Everyone needs to understand probability and statistics maybe 10X better than they currently do. That should be the focus!

Yes, this!

It’s crazy that we spend a decade of a person’s life forcing them to learn a skill that is so completely irrelevant to their lives and yet we ignore skills that could help them from being manipulated or forced into debt slavery.

I need to come up with a better analogy, but it’s like we were still forcing our children to manipulate a cotton gin and know the ins and outs of maintaining and repairing one. I mean, I’m sure it’s interesting and now I want to look up a YouTube video about cotton gins, but do we really need to force this upon everyone? And then we decide that if you didn’t memorize how to change out the plumbus in the cotton gin perfectly then you aren’t allowed to do further study in marine biology.

If I believed in conspiracy theories then I would think that Big Scary Corporations are in cahoots with The Government to keep the public from knowing how not to be manipulated and forcing them to work for low wages for their entire lives. But I don’t believe this because I think the reality is a lot more mundane and stupid. I think it’s just like the story you hear about why your mom learned to cook the ham by cutting off the end and finding out after some investigation that the only reason was because her grandmother had a small pan and we all just tend to continue doing what has sorta kinda worked without thinking about it. But in this case we can’t just make individual decisions to do something different because we’ve decided that the API between secondary school and college is an admissions test that includes certain irrelevant things that we can’t change because of history and the API between college and a job is something completely different.

> Most high-school math classes are still preparing students for the Sputnik era. Steve Levitt wants to get rid of the “geometry sandwich” and instead have kids learn what they really need in the modern era: data fluency. [1]

I do agree probability and statistics would be much better than calculus, trigonometry, and some minutiae of algebra and geometry.

[1] https://freakonomics.com/podcast/americas-math-curriculum-do...

As someone who did all of it and ended up majoring in engineering, in my opinion calc is the least practical of the senior high school math courses— geometry and data management (stats/probability) are both much more likely to be useful to normal people doing their taxes, understanding elections, fitting furniture into rooms, whatever.

That said, I think calculus is helpful in the way that learning a niche programming language is helpful: it teaches you about new kinds of abstractions, how to think in a different way, and gives particular language with which to talk about that kind of thing.

The problem is that this point of view ignores reality: motivated parents will just have their children learn calculus in outside classes.

The reality is for these students, "standard" middle and high school math is mind-numbingly boring.

The best outcome would be that the best schools and teachers use the surplus time to teach stuff that's off-curriculum like logic, discrete math, stats, programming, etc.

Maybe true but that won't get them a calculus credit on their transcript.

> The reality is for these students, "standard" middle and high school math is mind-numbingly boring. >The best outcome would be that the best schools and teachers use the surplus time to teach stuff that's off-curriculum like logic, discrete math, stats, programming, etc.

This is also true I was one of these students. My middle school did almost exactly this. They had a per algebra class that explored all sorts of random topics. We did things like clock math, and observed how these other mathematical systems did or did not observe things like the associative property. It was amazing because it made math more than just doing calculations. This class is still one of my fondest educational memories.

> This is also true I was one of these students. My middle school did almost exactly this. They had a per algebra class that explored all sorts of random topics.

What textbook / textbooks did your class use for this?

As far as I can tell you don't need an official transcript from an accredited school to get into college. We are homeschooling our kids and what I've read is that homeschoolers write their own transcript, the kids themselves write it, and they describe what they've accomplished and learned during their schooling career and admission depts in colleges tend to favor these kids over traditionally schooled kids.

I'm guessing that a traditionally schooled kid could just do the same. Especially since there's so much that they are probably learning outside of school. It would be a shame to ignore all of those skills and knowledge just because they weren't taught during the hours of 8 and 3, M-F.

I'd be interested to learn more about this. Where can I find data on how admissions depts view homeschooled kids versus other kids?

I’m just now starting to really look into this since our eldest is now twelve years old. We do unschooling if our home, which is a form of self-directed education, so my focus has been on those experiences.

Here’s an research paper about Grown Unschoolers experiences with higher education, page 38 discusses admissions: https://www.othereducation.org/index.php/OE/article/view/105...

And here’s a reddit thread about homeschoolers getting into Purdue (which is the school I went to): https://www.reddit.com/r/Purdue/comments/bszc3i/have_any_hom...

I’m assuming that each school is going to have their own criteria.

AFAIK, accredited online courses get credit on the high school transcript. Take a look at options: https://www.collegetransitions.com/blog/where-should-I-take-...

I like this effort to understand/summary of the other side in good faith (even though one can believe math education is important).

I think way of rationalizing it is that there are some parents that feel that orchestra, art exploration, debate, sports or <insert subject/extracurricular of choice> at the collegiate level. After all, many students excel at these and could get into an Ivy league/Big 10 college based on their performance in these subjects. At one point a district may decide to offer collegiate level coursework to students.

Then funding dries up and cuts need to be made. Which courses should be kept and which should be cut and how should resources be allocated is a real question.

Perhaps competitive math courses or multivariate calculus should be considered an "after school extracurricular" similar to the many after school extracurricular sports programs and schools should just focus on providing basic "PE level equivalent" math.

I made a whole career out of publishing NLP research based on the evidence from competitive debate. 11/10 would recommend.

Debate is also the best and most robust pipeline there is to getting into law school, and good law schools at that. Model UN and mock trial don’t even hold a candle to it in rigor.

> it's only a small number of unusual people who need to learn calculus

Any STEM career. Finance and economics. Data science--the component they're replacing middle-school algebra with, the CMF's authors know as much about data science as about math.

Californians whose parents can't afford tutors have been effective gated from these careers.

It also depends heavily on how you define "need". Calculus changed the way I view many, many concepts and phenomena. I think we present things like calculus as dryly as possible, and only to those blessed few who we perceive as able to understand it, and in doing so, we deprive so many people of a useful new way of considering problems. Whether it ends up being critical to their chosen career seems like a really narrow and poor criterion.

> I think we present things like calculus as dryly as possible

A lot of this is because the hiring pipeline has dried up. I went to a top hs here in the Bay Area and had teachers who were very knowledgeable and invested in STEM education.

Because of extremely low salaries when factoring in CoL, a replacement pipeline hasn't formed. I had 4-5 of my classmates in HS end up majoring in STEM and minoring in Education at the big 3 UCs, but all of them decided to become Data Analysts or SWEs instead because they would be provided a living wage without having to go get a masters for an additional $30-40k and/or a formal teaching credential for an additonal $12-15k. They were looking at a $150k bill just to earn $70-80k starting AT BEST in Silicon Valley.

I have friends who are/were teachers. I can't imagine why anyone would subject themselves to that. Low pay, spoiled out of control children, their evn worse parents, active shooter drills/real active shooters, fucking TikTok.

I wouldn't do that job if it paid double what I make now.

Hot take, but parents don't parent anymore.

I've seen antisocial behavior rise in both kids from well off backgrounds as well as from kids from less well off backgrounds. In both cases, the parents aren't an active participant in their kid's lives.

The kids (both rich and poor) with present parents always ended up well established and this was irrespective of race.

The only benefit that money had was it could open some doors if the kid f**ed up.

One of my acquaintance's HS going kid has an active drug problem and has ended up in in the drunk tank a couple times, but because my acquaintance is a white collar professional who can afford to live in a well off neighborhood, they can afford the legal fees. If this was some black kid in West Oakland or a Latino kid in East San Jose or a Vietnamese kid in Newark, they would have ended up in Jail/Juvie, lost critical learning time, and have no real options or safety net to fall on.

I know that older people complaining about younger people is literally ancient, but I can't help but feel that cell phones + social media is doing some real damage. It hurts adults, I can't imagine experiencing it with a developing mind.

This is a good analysis, but you're missing another angle: quite a few kids are not developmentally ready[0] for algebra in 8th grade but most are ready in 9th grade. By forcing kids who are not developmentally ready into algebra you generally do more harm then good (most of those kids will hate math for the rest of their lives). This problem also occurs earlier in school life with fractions. When I was in education I saw pushing students too early like this do a lot of damage that had to be cleaned up by tutors at a later date and was totally unnecessary.

I even think Calculus could still be achieved by the end of high school with the right curriculum choices - you can teach a lot of calculus concepts to grace schoolers if you elide the actual mechanics of computation. Anecdotally, students who were pushed through that sort of curriculum earlier in middle school tended to breeze through high school calc.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piaget%27s_theory_of_cognitive...

>For pure signaling reasons, taking calculus in high school has become very important for college admissions.

I mean, it really depends on the school and the major. If you're taking a STEM major in college, having calculus on your resume is the equivalent of having a degree on your resume. You may not need it to succeed (I do not use calculus in my day to day job), but you can see why it makes you stand out.

But sure, if you're more on a medical/law/humanities track, calculus shouldn't really matter for your admissions. It only matters in that calculus makes you understand math better, and math is one of the core subjects used by the SAT/ACT. Naturally, knowing calculus makes those tests much easier to reason about. Maybe we should revisit why Math is weighed so heavily in national tests if we feel this way about math in the curriculum.

I can see the intents, but it feels like it sweeps the core problems under the rug. As usual for education.

Algebra is fundamental to problem solving.

Learning to code would have been much harder if I hadn't grasped algebra.

Calculus is important for understanding science (especially physics) and statistics.

These are not niche subjects for "the few weird students." They are really important to grasp for many roles in the knowledge economy. Your kids will enter a world of robotics and automation. They're going to need to use their brains if they want to succeed.

I'm 100% against a dumbing down of the education system to achieve ideological leftwing aims.

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