On the flip side of your point, I find myself taking weird positions on issues of what should be in curricula. It seems to me that most people carry around a mental model of schooling such that schools just pour knowledge onto a hard drive that then retains it for the rest of that person's life. But this doesn't stand up under 5 minute's examination if you look around in the world. All those polls about how 60% of $FIRST_WORLD_COUNTRY can't even name the number of $SUBDIVISION they have (state, province, whatever)? They all went to school, too. Is it really a crisis if we remove something from the curriculum that 90%+ of 40-year-olds can't recall anymore? Curricula debates should be grounded in reality, not some fantasy where we apparently spend 12 years downloading a couple dozen megabytes of text into people's brainharddrives and set the read-only bit.

Also: It is impossible to understand the solution to a problem you don't have: http://www.jerf.org/iri/post/2943

I'm with you on this. I would rather have schools spend more time on problem solving and critical thinking, and less on memorizing facts that can be looked up later.

The major obstacle is that it is much more difficult to teach thinking than it is to teach facts. So it's harder to find, train, support, and retain teachers who can do that well.

"Common Core" math (the stuff you might see mocked on Facebook) is trying to move toward teaching kids how to think mathematically, rather than memorizing equations and formats. But it's hard going (again, see the mockery on Facebook), and may not actually the right direction.

I think you might be right and I was wrong, or at least didn't put it correctly.

Compound interest should be taught in terms of examples people will likely use. So when they first get a credit card offer at a certain %APR, or a chance to invest, they immediately pull out law of 72 and do some quick estimath.

I can't speak for anyone else, but in my case at least, that's how it was taught. I remember the teacher going through problems on the chalkboard - "you want that brand new stereo for 150$ (This was the nineties) and you decide to put it on your credit card and then make the minimum payments. What's that stereo actually going to cost you?"