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Comment by softwarebeware | Hacker News Reader

> The point of the question is that it's posed by the people who aren't going to go on to create weather reports, credit card payment systems, video games, etc.

I don't think so. If you're in high school and you ask this question, you surely do mean something like "what activity will I possibly doing in my future career that would require calculus" and in that case the answer that you may be a financial analyst, a meteorologist, an electrical engineer, etc. is right on. It's exactly what kids want to know.

But now there's this myth that "you won't ever use calculus in real life" which is totally wrong.

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But then why not just take these things in college, when you major in electrical engineering and are taking all the other highly specific classes for your field of interest? It makes no sense to make someone bound for e.g. a career in the arts to suffer through calculus. You could replace that time sink with something more productive and generally useful, like learning to program. Now you can make a website for your art portfolio without having to pay a webdev.

> productive and generally useful, like learning to

to reason.

it would be great to teach people critical thinking. at every age, at every year.

applied epistemology, rationality, etc. of course no need for those fancy words.

... and during those lessons at one point they could learn about the usefulness of models, and the usefulness of math, money, programming, etc.

but otherwise there's no point in ramming math/programming/finance directly into the heads of kids.

If the goal is to teach reasoning then I think most 101/102 level calculus fails at that. For most students (including mine when I took it), their experience is just getting through generalized homework problems or an exam than actually applying that calculus to test a scientific hypothesis. Reasoning is taught better in those sciences, such as physics, biology, chemistry, or statistics, where you are explicitly developing and testing a null hypothesis. Maybe replacing calculus with statistics in high school curricula would be a lot more useful, if the goal is to teach reasoning and critical thinking.

I think math in general fails at that. After all it's just one tool in the big ol' cognitive shed.

(This is why I think the recent brouhaha about California changing some requirements completely misses the point... but meh. Education is like healthcare, completely broken and fucked in all the ways it could be.)

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