Put another way, if you drew a Venn diagram of "stuff that would be useful for adulthood" and "stuff most kids would study until they were at least adequately skilled entirely of their own volition", the circles would barely overlap.
Sure, this doesn't apply to the average Hacker News reading autodidact, but one of the first things you learn in statistics is not to make judgements based on outliers.
I think the second statement applies perfectly well to most adults. Our whole system is based on having people maximally specialize into their element of greatest comparative advantage, to the exclusion of most of what we regard as maturity, wisdom, and humanity.
Statistics gets a bad rap, but it is far more important for day-to-day life than people give it credit for.
Math is not important at all for the vast majority of adults today.
This is just plain not true. I can't speak for calculus, but in addition to what I mention above, there's plenty of day-to-day need for math by the general public - money handling skills, for example, are something that almost everyone should have.
Statistics are useful in the way the parent post mentioned.
Logarithms are useful for better understanding some statistics, but this has less every day use than the two above.
And while I do not use calculus in my every day life I still find it very useful to reason about ordinary things in the terms of derivates and integrals. It has given my new ways to think about problems.
I could not agree more.
This was the most useless school ever.
The point of learning math is there's an inflexible scorecard of reality for an incredibly complicated logic puzzle, and the only determiner of adequacy in the subject is persistence. Now if you want to excel you need the knack or genetics or whatever, but mere adequacy only takes a certain amount of sweat.
So it teaches that at least some times there's certain logical rules where one follows from the other or can be combined with another, and if you're persistent you can figure it out. Or just summarize to persistence and logic.
I really don't care if your wife can solve 2x=4 for x, but I would be unhappy to be under her care if she would give up on complicated situations (oh he's not breathing AND no pulse? I'll just give up), or refuses to notice cause and effect relationships.
You really don't know what you are talking about here. How you can make the link from not being good or enjoying math to just giving up on something critical is completely illogical.
"Most mathematicians at one time or another have probably found themselves in the position of trying to refute the notion that they are people with "a head for figures." or that they "know a lot of formulas." At such times it may be convenient to have an illustration at hand to show that mathematics need not be concerned with figures, either numerical or geometrical. For this purpose we recommend the statement and proof of our Theorem 1. The argument is carried out not in mathematical symbols but in ordinary English; there are no obscure or technical terms. Knowledge of calculus is not presupposed. In fact, one hardly needs to know how to count. Yet any mathematician will immediately recognize the argument as mathematical, while people without mathematical training will probably find difficulty in following the argument, though not because of unfamiliarity with the subject matter.
What, then, to raise the old question once more, is mathematics? The answer, it appears, is that any argument which is carried out with sufficient precision is mathematical, and the reason that your friends and ours cannot understand mathematics is not because they have no head for figures, but because they are unable [or unwilling, DRH] to achieve the degree of concentration required to follow a moderately involved sequence of inferences. This observation will hardly be news to those engaged in the teaching of mathematics, but it may not be so readily accepted by people outside of the profession. For them the foregoing may serve as a useful illustration."
College Admissions and the Stability of Marriage, Gale & Shapley, The American Mathematical Monthly (Jan 1962)
From a link I believe on HN to http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2013/08/a-few-words-about... which lead eventually to http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2012/10/rigor_math_and.h...
When, after high school, will you have to factor a quadratic or describe to me in detail how a cell works? Who after high school does that? A very small population. However, who lives in an organized society with a set of beliefs that will have to judge and effect those beliefs? EVERYONE! Who will have to read something or judge a document put out by the government? EVERYONE!
(The full caps is somewhat required as he would always stand on top of his desk and yell it at the class...)
Independent of the studies (there are more) I think that stats is very underserved in society. Nurses should know statistics. Knowing joint %s and Bayesian stats are useful in treatment and diagnosis. Much of health care is moving from doctors to nurses, and it's important for them. Stats are also important for people making investments. And buying lottery tickets. And buying a house. And making judgements in daily living.
I strongly, strongly suspect the arrow points the other way.
However, a grasp of calculus and statistics (those two came to mind, there are surely others) is useful if you want to break past existing boundaries because they give you some tools to think abstractly. Personally, I want my kids to learn that. They already have plenty of time to explore on their own - the time spent in a classroom should, in my opinion, be spent on learning fundamentals very deeply.
It's not only hard to teach yourself calculus, it's also something you wouldn't think of doing unless you're Gauss or one of those guys.
Agree with the rest, kind of disagree with this part. Measure the slope of a curve, measure the area under a curve. No big whoop. Sure, the details get fiddly but 90% of anxiety over calculus comes from its arbitrary place as the capstone of a suffocatingly rigid elementary math sequence, not its inherent difficulty or magisterial importance.
Stats and discrete math are harder imho, and people teach themselves those all the time. Helps that they're much more useful (outside physics and engineering anyways...)