As someone who fucking hated and still hates academical math: No, kids do not need math. Not in the sense as taught in schools, anyway. That is a straight waste of precious time.

What kids need is broader context and guidance for what math is, how it applies to the world around us, how we can use it, and why it's important. Fuck quadratic equations and counting slices of pie, none of that literal bullshit is useful as taught to kids today.

Perhaps the biggest failing with academic math is that it is geared towards a subset of students who can suspend curiosity in order to memorize equations and learn precisely the place to apply them. These are often the students who dislike word problems because it causes them to actually think about the work they are doing. That is to say, I don’t hold contempt for these students as they are just optimizing their academic experience - there is no room for actual rational thinking with how math is taught.

My point here is that everyone loses: those who want to bring rationality and purpose into math are left behind because they cannot keep up due to pesky curiosity and those who can parrot equations and mechanically solve trivial problems are lured into the false sense of deep knowledge their grades would suggest. We need to do better for our students but nobody in a position to enact change actually cares enough to do the legwork in revamping how we teach and communicate mathematics or any other subjects for that matter.

Would you mind explaining why you still hate math? It seems like a strange thing to hate except for trauma from school.

Are you referring to K-12 level math only? Math at the college level is very useful. Most of the math I was taught in K-12 was just how to calculate (which is mostly useless in a world with computers) and basic algebra. Basic algebra is useful, but only really as a building block to more powerful math.

> What kids need is broader context and guidance for what math is, how it applies to the world around us, how we can use it, and why it's important. Fuck quadratic equations and counting slices of pie, none of that literal bullshit is useful as taught to kids today.

I completely agree that math curriculum in the US needs a significant overhaul to be more useful, more interesting and a better base for learning advanced mathmatics. Actually coming up with a detailed curriculum that students can follow is pretty difficult.

As someone who found K-12 math really easy and boring, I was very peeved when I found out in college that there is a bunch of fun math that I could have been learning throughout school.

Useful to whom? I've been coding for 30 years and the most complicated math ever I used was for calculating distance between two lat/lon points and even that I looked up.

Is it useful to an average worker sitting in front of a PC? I do not believe so.

I apologize if I didn't make myself clear: I hate academical math. I love math, especially once I realized how truly relevant it is to quite literally everything around me.

It was computer programming, long after and outside my academical times, that taught me what math really was about. Suddenly, all those numbers and letters had actual meanings and values to them, I learned I could manipulate them to store and mean literally anything. It was a mindblowing paradigm shift in my way of understanding and thinking everything.

All the teachers and textbooks in the world failed to teach me the true value and purpose of math, and I loathe them for wasting my time with their absolute failure.

I'm not good at math, so I have no idea what I'd use it for. I'd probably get a high end tech job working with advanced stuff, and whatever I was doing there would be stuff that made no sense to someone who doesn't already know math.

It's exactly the kind of leap of faith that young people seem to be uninterested in.

People have figured out by now that they will always have a calculator 99% of the time, and probably won't need math in the remaining 1%, Google can tell you how to do niche stuff that doesn't come up a lot, and lots of the stuff you use math for also requires specialist equipment, so you'll probably just hire someone.

Perhaps if we had more of a DIY culture. But even then, I do a lot of DIY work and almost never encounter math, because I've got FreeCAD.

And even though I'm vaguely aware of they Pythagorean theorem, I doubt I'd use it to find the height of a tree, I'd draw it as a sketch and use a constraint solver, actually seeing the triangle on the screen would make it a little clearer if there was a mistake, and it's one less calculation to mess up.

Or, I'd just use the height feature on the laser measurement tool.

I do have friends who use math in real life, but I rarely see them do anything they couldn't do with an understanding of what software can do, rather than an understanding of the actual physics.

And yet everyone seems to say they are very happy to have learned it, and most of our big innovations are from people who know it.

I think the important part is how do you convey the benefit of math without saying anything people will immediately recognize as kind of an exaggeration.

Math isn't directly useful in an average person's life, it gives people the possibility of doing certain things average people don't do, and lets people understand things, that are not always obvious ahead of time why you would want to understand them.

I’m a California taxpayer who repays the cost of my entire education several times over every year. I’m proud to do so. But let’s get quality for our money.

Naturally, the mathematicians laid out for everyone the short path to deep competence in advanced math as fast as possible. Only seems obvious to them.

This path ignores the obvious fact that 99.5% of students are not intrinsically motivated to persevere through the decade-long marathon to reach PHD level math. No one in the kids’ lives ever made it clear why this is a goal worth investing in. Even their teachers don’t know. Not well enough to explain it.

It’s not even assumed you grok the fun puzzle game that is math. Instead, math is presented as an unending series of seemingly arbitrary rules that all strictly build on each other, eventually leading to an end goal of… … …

You are simply required to memorize these rules because if you fail you are a failure. And, maybe if you are unlucky you will utilize something more advanced than basic arithmetic twice a year for the rest of your life.

The reality is that math is tremendously interesting and useful and fun. But, all the life was sucked out of it from the beginning of public education. Before the common kids had a chance to even be presented with the idea that math can be fun.

We gotta turn this around. Present math as the game that is it. Not a “gamification” to artificially push you into doing things you don’t want to do. But, something that’s actually fun to do in itself.

The current math curriculum is about giving people a strong base for using math outside mathematics itself, in case they want to study physics or some other science, or engineering. Mathematicians do not generally give a shit about the computational aspect (it’s not what math is about, generally speaking) which you spend most of your time doing in math curricula until you’re at the point where further studying math suggests you are interested in math itself.

The vast majority of people who struggle in math IME have at least one of two problems: one is they struggle with it and put up some mental barrier of being “bad at math”, the other is they fell behind at some point and the curriculum kept chugging along with no chance for the student to catch up (which just makes the subsequent material fail to stick and confusing). This has nothing to do with some nefarious mathematicians’ agenda and everything to do with the school system not allowing students to progress at different rates based on proficiency.

Interesting take, completely opposite of my educational experience.

I have a terrible memory for remembering random things so I always did badly in subjects that are all about memorization (like history). Math was my refuge where I excelled, as it didn't require to memorize anything. Everything could be derived by logic; I could solve all problems on the spot during tests instead of having to hope I memorized the right answers earlier.

All other classes were of the form: (1) teacher presents a bunch of facts; (2) I'm supposed to memorize them all; (3) then I need to regurgitate a random sampling of them back during the test. I hated that so much. Math was the exception to that pattern, so I loved it.

This is the most powerful tool for making your life easier

Therefore, there was nothing logical about academical math and it didn't help me think logically about anything.

Or using derivatives to find optimal material amount needed? Which would be tricky to memorize 100%

Like how could you even manage thru a lot of years and exams purely on memory?

You gotta understand somewhat this stuff.

Just because you dont know how to reinvent derivatives and integrals then it doesnt mean that there is no logic involved

Sure I was, but what does "x + 4 = 13 - 2x" actually mean?

That sheer lack of context is what I hate about academical math. WTF is the point of it all? The answer is there is no point, other than scoring adequately on tests so teachers can collect their paychecks and schools their funding.

>You gotta understand somewhat this stuff.

I was never taught to understand, I was only ever taught to do. That is meaningless and, as far as I've experienced, still irrelevant in my life to this very day.

Practice of math and logic.

>That sheer lack of context is what I hate about academical math.

Isnt this beautiful?

Math doesnt need context, especially cultural context.

We dont need examples with apples, cars or money to do the math.

Sure, they are helpful for kids, but at some point they are so used to abstract concepts that theres no need for that.

So not only logic is being practiced, but also abstract thinking.

>still irrelevant in my life to this very day.

We dont do math just to apply some random ass formulas. As ive said it improves logical and abstract thinking. Both of them can make significant impact on someones life.

It can be seen everywhere in real life, especially during arguments.

It’s not the system. If you have parents that are involved in education and engage in the kind of child-rearing, that is conducive to education - it doesn’t matter the kind of system you’re operating under (keep in mind, our bar for success is very low - we want kids that graduate high-school to be functionally literate with basic arithmetic and basic general knowledge).

Put another way, if a child graduates and they are functionally illiterate, I don’t care how bad California’s public education is, the fault lays with the parents for letting their child be illiterate.

Parents are part of the problem, but it seems like we’re just desperately trying to pin the responsibility on one specific person in the child’s life and put it out of their personal responsibility. That’s not the case. Some kids get everything they need to succeed provided for them and have plenty of assistance and choose to fail. Some have nothing but barriers put all around them and they still bust their ass to succeed.

Put another way, you cannot convince me that the parents are not at fault when a kid can’t read or write after 15 years of education (after having sampled many many teachers and teaching styles, including summer school and remedial education, during that time).

It’s a compounding problem and each time we assign blame to one (1) thing, we’re leaving other causes untreated and not making the problem better at all.

There are plenty of kids with great parents who are surrounded by awful peers at school and media that glorifies being uneducated. Then you leave 2 bad kids in a class of good kids, and you’ll get endless distractions that cause the others to give up and resent school. You address just one cause and you have countless others. You need to go after a load of issues and it’s honestly more complicated than we want to admit.

It really is a task for the society compared to the individual, otherwise you will never ever ever have a fair system. Success in schools should not be so dependent on the parents. What about single parents? Do you just accept that it will be miserable for them to get their kids trough school? Parents without a lot of education will also have a problem of helping their kids. And what about those kids? Will you just leave them behind? It's not their fault they are born in the wrong family. This is just a take I would just really not agree with.

That’s the current theory and it fails. The reality is that public eduction is education at (massive) scale. There is no amount of available resources to create, say, a personalized learning environment with dedicated teachers for individual students - when you’re dealing with millions, or tens of millions of students. Parental involvement is so critical because that is the individualized focus that is needed by kids.

There is no way for you to create a public system that overcomes the success that comes out of parents who are involved and invested in their child’s education. No way.

I do not see such evidence, maybe it fails in san francisco but that can have thousands of reasons. Everything I've read here points me to the fact that the public education is not good/comprehensive enough and too inflexible. I am honestly a bit shocked what i've read here, this is definitely not my experience with public education, like not at all. San francisco is rich, people make a lot of money there. There is no excuse why public education should not excel. I bet every major politician has his kids on a private school and also every other decision maker.

> There is no way for you to create a public system that overcomes the success that comes out of parents who are involved and invested in their child’s education

This is not exactly what I said. It is probably impossible in practice to eliminate this advantage. But while impossible to eliminate, you can try to minimise it and you should. It's the only fair thing to do because kids can't choose their parents. I would go further, it's the only ethical thing to do.

Well … yeah. It’s education at scale. Anything at scale will be inflexible by definition.

> San francisco is rich, people make a lot of money there.

And there’s a lot of funding. The median per student funding in the SF school board is something on the order of 2 or 3 times the median US funding (a quick Google shows ~$22k vs $7k) and when compared to global averages, it’s through the roof. It’s not the level of funding. It’s not even the administration and curriculum either (remember, our bar is very low - we just want kids that can read when they graduate).

The way I figure, optimizing public education is a last-mile problem. There is value in taking kids from a B to an A, or providing a more enriching educational experience. So don’t think I’m arguing against more funding and better management. But this isn’t going to solve the core issue - parental neglect (and it is neglect if a kid graduates high school illiterate). At scale, the state cannot make up for that kind of neglect. In fact, that’s a big reason why you see the divide growing - everything that is tried, just ends up marginally improving or marginally deteriorating educational experience of kids who are already doing reasonably well.

> But while impossible to eliminate, you can try to minimise it and you should.

And my argument is, we’ve largely hit the limit on this kind of optimization. Spending more, and/or changing the curriculum with the same cohort of teachers, isn’t going to give you anything better than trivial (at best) improvements.

> ~$22k wow...this is honestly insane. I wonder how many full-time teacher positions per class this could afford. What's the most comprehensive schools education you can get there? In germany there's been the recent rise of all-day options at schools (school until 4pm covering lessons, homework and studying for exams and optional topics like school orchestra or more intense sports). 22k should pay for that and this would help overworked or overwhelmed parents. My girlfriend and her sister was raised by a single mother and went to one when it was still the exception (roughly ~40% are enrolling at all day schools right now, but it really started nation wide ~2002). It was quite different to my experience at a "normal" school class. She liked it.

I struggle to imagine how you can raise two daughters, work a full time job in a competitive housing market (so you can't really reduce your hours because the rent is high) while finding the time to invest enough time into the education of your children. At least the amount of time my parents have put in would be straight up impossible (one was working full time, the other reduced to 50% so afternoons there was always one present at home).

We cannot rely on support from parents, the system we design needs to be thought of with parents out of the equation because in the case of the most vulnerable of kids they will not have parents that can help them. Special tutoring needs to be a part of the system, outsourcing the work will make things cheaper but it will complicate things for those struggling.

Kids in need should be our priority, because the ones that have supportive parents are really going to receive that support regardless.

I agree on everything else though. Content shouldn't be watered down, school needs to be a safe haven for kids in need. We should be having our most capable people thinking on how to improve the educational system so that we can truly bring everyone forward as we progress.

There is no way to really fix those problems by changing the school system. You can have bandaids, like providing free food at school, but that’s fixing the problem at the wrong level.

There is a difference between "parents always matter to a child's education" and "let's stop trying to improve schools cause what's the point". The latter is basically the same as "schools are pointless, why have them in the first place?". If you believe that, look at some countries that don't have schools...

I think every school should have the possibility to put your kid in an all-day school, I can't imagine the strain on single parents or parents where both have to work a lot otherwise.

Of course it's not possible to eliminate parents as an important factor of the success of your kid, but you can help.

As I understood it (not a parent and it not available when I was at school): You have all-day classes and "normal" classes at school. The kids in all-day classes stay together during the day and the kids in the other class go home, it is not an optional add-on. My niece is attending all-day school with a musical focus and likes it very much. All day classes differ between schools and classes, with school on 3-5 afternoons until 4 pm. Supervision is given for homework and studying for exams.

In addition to being a continually renewing supply of teachers, it provides an income stream for those who might really need it and financially incentivizes academic excellence.

why pay students to tutor? make tutoring younger kids part of the curriculum. teaching a skill is the best way to practice and internalize the skill for yourself.

montessori is already doing this very effectively.

What percentage of children are capable of learning "the math" in practical conditions and circumstances?

What is the distribution of ideal ages for children to learn "the math" in practical conditions and circumstances?

What happens when those ages (for most) don't line up with the various social factors that will contrive to make certain they permanently lose the opportunity to learn "the math"?

Should my children have to wait years to learn it because your children aren't ready yet but the education system can't afford to teach it twice to two separate smaller groups? What if that means pushing it to the point where my children would age out of the education system, and they never get to learn it, even if they'll be better at it then yours will be?

The education system is wrong. You get that right. But what you fail to see is that it can't ever be made non-wrong. What you want out of it isn't the same thing I want out of it. Or that the other guy wants out of it. If we look at how the education system functions, it only ever had political goals. Those have shifted over the years as various factions found new uses for it. At first it was just a jobs program of sorts. And maybe a little ethnic homogenization program. Little snippets of cultural genocide here and there in problematic geographic regions. Then it became a unionized voting bloc. And now it's just a treadmill to keep children busy and stupid so they don't ever quite figure out what was done to them. It's government-funded daycare in an economy that increasingly can never afford for even one parent to be home during the day in the early developmental years.

And it has done all those things remarkably well, and reasonably cheap too. What's broken that you really need to fix? Sure, I'm a little sarcastic there... but why can't you see that this system doesn't have any mechanism that will allow for non-superficial reform? Those with the power to do that don't use the public education system anyway.

If schools were bad, but modern society can't function without them, which would you pick? If you say it can't function without them, then are they good regardless because you want it to continue to function?

Like, no matter how bad they are? Or do you draw some line or another? "It's ok if they make kids dumb and compulsive consumers, but they can't go torturing them!"

Asking questions like this seems to be more about dogma and status quo than anything else.

Even regardless of collapse, I still much prefer living (and having gone to school) in a country that has schools. At no point did it seem to me what the point of school is to make people dumb. That wasn't the US and wherever yours was, your experience may be different, but I really don't understand the level of cynicism triggered here by every discussion involving schools. Access to education has brought lots of people out of poverty and I'm rather sure the vast majority of children much prefer school to hard work in the fields. I also think it's pretty clear thay on the scale of centuries schools around the world have improved tremendously. On the scale of decades and centuries, physical violence and bullying has decreased a lot, both by teachers and children, while creativity and understanding play a more important role in lessons today than was ever the case in compulsory education systems.

Sure. And if schools had anything to do with education, maybe they could do that here too. But you're also commenting in a thread where there is a link to credible (uncontested, uncontroversially attested) reports that the schools are shutting down education. Purportedly to help make everyone equal.

It's arguable what the cause of this is, the reasoning behind the decisions, etc. But that's what it says. They've started teaching less math. Not teaching it differently. Not teaching it at a different age. They just don't.

It would almost be a relief if you were to dispute the reports themselves, and claimed it was some weird conspiracy theory. This would be more compatible with the attitude that you're expressing.

In the US, schools and education started with little overlap, and have less year to year.

To my mind, the outrage is somewhat exaggerated. You could call it "outrage fetishism about culture war issues". Also an opportunity for "smart people" to feel good about "how they managed to learn things despite having to go to school" and how much better they think they could organize the school system, or how much smarter they would have been if no schools had existed.

Yes, maybe the stated reasons for trying this reform were stupid and maybe it should have been obvious to people it wouldn't work. But, crucially, they are willing to scrap what doesn't work and try something else. That can go a very long way given some time. And yes, that leaves us with an imperfect school system. Very different from arguing against having schools at all, a position far more outrageous to my mind than any "woke nonsense" I've been subjected to so far.

And they'll start it again eventually. Maybe in a different district or a different state. This isn't the kind of thing they give up on easily or quickly, and they're not the sort to learn from their own failed experiments.

> and how much better they think they could organize the school system

No one could organize it. I couldn't. It's beyond any reform, beyond fixing. It is an intractable problem. Well, if you assume that its purpose is education.

If we examine its true, unspoken purpose, it is working far better than it ever has, and improves year to year. It is a mechanism for the government to raise children from the earliest age on up through adulthood, with parents have as little influence on that process as can be cheaply afforded.

My wife and I homeschool.

> But, crucially, they are willing to scrap what doesn't work and try something else.

No, they're willing to tone things down to avoid any PR backlash, and try again later when maybe those concerned are less attentive. All they have to do is be willing to try as many times as it takes, until they get lucky with the news cycle or the like.

I mean, from your perspective... why would they care if it didn't work? Do you imagine that the government (or any of its agencies or subdivisions as the case may be) loves these children? That it would grieve if a few thousand of them were permanently undereducated or miseducated by this? Would this committee cry itself to sleep every night regretting what it did wrong?

If it can't do these things, if it can't have regret or remorse of some sort when it does bad things, how can you imagine that it would ever stop doing bad things when those bad things cause it no inconvenience or problem?

>a position far more outrageous to my mind

I'd never say that about anything. There's nothing that I hold so sacred that I'd say "it's just outrageous that you want to get rid of X" or "are you mad that you'd say we should have Y?"

For me, I'd make good arguments outlining why there should be X, or that there should be a Y. And if you failed to agree, I'd try to understand what logic (or failure thereof) caused you remain unpersuaded.

When someone says something like this phrase though, all I can figure is that the status quo is important to them for irrational reasons. I've yet to hear a better hypothesis.

> Would this committee cry itself to sleep

It's possible to have working political systems achieving meaningful goals without anyone involved having to cry themselves to sleep. There's a lot of people who care about improving things (including those who implemented these policies). They really think they can make education better and they're really trying. Now, there will be disagreement about what the goals are and how to achieve any given goal. Over time, a democracy is very good at distilling these disagreements into policies that almost always aren't terrible (as opposed to "occasionally excellent" or something like that). The best way to get what you want is to take part in that process. I'm pretty sure trying to pretend "there's no such thing as society" and that you're living in an anarchy bites you in the back eventually (not that I think you're doing that).

> I'd never say [outrageous]

Maybe that word means something else to you than to me (I learned English in school). I would call a large part of this discussion and these comments here "public outrage". There is public outrage about a reform that made a few schools worse. The outrage lead to a change of policy. This is good and how a democratic process generally works. I also see "outrageous" as a spectrum, where you can of course discuss outrageous things but extraordinary claims (or proposals) require extraordinary evidence (or arguments). Arguing against schools is such an instance in my mind, comparable to arguing against medicine or rule if law (I assume at the very least 98% of people in my country would agree).

I'm aware of US education systems being called broken a lot. We call ours broken too but that only drives efforts to improve it, not giving up. My outside perspective is that the system you have is certainly preferable to no schools at all, that it's definitely possible to improve it, and that it will improve (over decades to centuries) assuming human civilization doesn't (partially) collapse.

Serious question: for what? Basic algebra, yes. And basic geometry is handy in many jobs as well. But beyond that?

wrt who has failed on them iirc countries like Finland figured how to largely lift the dependency from home, family, parents.

"You won't, but one of the smart kids might." [1]

Dumb kids can turn into smart kids, so they need math too.

[1] https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/why-i-couldn39t-be-a-math-...

Along the way, everybody has a chance to get a feel for math in the world, which I would say is on par with a certain base in the humanities; we should strive for every citizen to have it, even if it’s not strictly needed for survival in the job market.

Trigonometry, calculus, vectors, complex numbers, group theory, matrices? Fun, but not something I expect to be used often enough to justify making it mandatory part of everyone's education.

Tutoring rarely helps anyone learn as it almost always consists in heavily guided spoon-feeding. Also there are very few good tutors as those who are adequately trained in math to tutor it have much better employment alternatives (including teaching).

In 25 years teaching math in universities I've never seen a student who used a tutor and learned math at the same time. I don't teach my kids math and I don't help them with their homework. What kids need is teachers who know math.

I would add, "and how to teach it." to that.

My final "Advanced Math" course in high school was a young teacher just out of college who apparently knew math, but failed completely at teaching anything meaningful to anyone in the class --- this may have been the fault of the textbook being used, but the fact that the school board chose to replace Calculus with this class because they couldn't find a teacher competent to teach it, speaks volumes to my mind.

I know, I know what about video game programmers? Okay, you got me there.