Beyond introductory level both probability and statistics have a lot of "counterintuitive" pre-probability and statistics results, that also explain a lot of the misconceptions the public faces in not understanding the notions.

Probability and statistics are topics that our democracies would be better of if people understood them: then they would understand perhaps topics like polling, and we wouldn't perhaps have misuse of the topics in Court like Sally Clark's case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sally_Clark

[But I guess we would have to drop lotteries as a taxation system also. [/s]]

Then the word calculus (and university admission perhaps with other goals in life) can be treated as variable(s). There is no inherent reason the set of deduction rules are dependent on the choice of topic. Let us denote the reasoning for brevity as a proposition p(s, g) with s\in Subjects g \in Goals:

Start substituting other subjects in there. Their reasoning goes that for an s \in Subjects to be in AcceptedSubjects \subset Subjects it must hold that:

p(s,g):=\(For the majority of students), \exists g \in Goals: p'(s,g). Where p(s,g) relaxes also the goal here -- doesn't have to be college admissions. Then start adding art, debates, writing and other topics I mentioned.

so, most of my high school classes? I'm not against a more customizable high school experience, but that seems like a harder sell than trying to convince these boards why this initiative is a horrible idea.

>Sure, at a certain point, it would be needed, but that would be for someone wanting to become a statistician, not the general population.

Depends, I guess. Physics has the same issue. Where introductory physics can be taught with formulas, AP physics expects you to understand the calculus behind the formulas and not simply spout out random factoids. There's no particularly best approach here.