I'm not sure this argument really has any force. Doctors need less math than engineers. Is "medical doctor" therefore a less valuable profession?
Similarly, electricians need very little math at all. We clearly need electricians. Should we just not educate the students we think are likely to be electricians? Or should we have a real discussion about what topics are most likely to enrich the lives of the most students?
We just yesterday had an article posted about the 1850's Harvard entrance exam. Surely, if they had a time machine, there'd be quite a few antebellum Harvard freshman willing to tell us all how important it is to memorize Thucydides in the original Greek.
The stronger variant of that argument is, I think, that you don't know how much better you could do your job with math until you know a substantial amount of the math that would improve it.
For instance, a large number of doctors tested (in a study I can't locate the citation for) fell prey to Base Rate Neglect[0] when doing a mock diagnosis. This seriously affects the amount of money wasted and the amount of illnesses cured in medicine. Along with a wide swath of related problems, it could be cured with an intuitive understanding of basic probability theory.
A way to bring this back to the productive side of the thread would be to point out that both sides can be right: the math taught in schools can be so irrelevant that nobody (outside engineering) retains it, meaning, we should teach more stat and less "pre-calc".
I agree. There's only so far you can go in probability theory without knowing calculus--but learning up to that point in probability is far more useful to 19 out of 20 non-engineers than calculus is.
The funny thing is that over here in the UK the press have claimed that schools are dumbing down maths education based partly on the fact that they don't teach calculus or geometry as part of the compulsory curriculum. It's been replaced with (amongst other things) basic probability and statistics which apparently wasn't taught until university before.
Interesting! The response of the press is predictable; but I'm actually very curious what the results will be for the generation raised on probability.
Similarly, electricians need very little math at all. We clearly need electricians. Should we just not educate the students we think are likely to be electricians? Or should we have a real discussion about what topics are most likely to enrich the lives of the most students?
We just yesterday had an article posted about the 1850's Harvard entrance exam. Surely, if they had a time machine, there'd be quite a few antebellum Harvard freshman willing to tell us all how important it is to memorize Thucydides in the original Greek.