First it is highly helpful in handling even basic household finance. Second, you cannot hope to understand even basic statistics without it (and with the way the media throws out statistics it is very dangerous not to understand at least the basics if you want to be a participatory citizen). But far beyond all that, it goes a very long way to teaching you how to think and how to make reasoned and rational decisions.
Also, I think you vastly underestimate the number of jobs that require going far beyond algebra. Virtually all technical jobs of any kind requires calculus. This includes almost all engineers, virtually all scientists, and most analysts. Also, most finance jobs involve math far beyond algebra. Remember that even fully analyzing interest rates involves calculus (or at least formulas derived from calculus, and a good analyst should know where they come from). And that is again before realizing that the mere study of math helps teach you to reason and think.
I am focusing only on math here, but I think you will find anyone in an advanced society will benefit greatly from algebra and far more than you seem to expect need calculus. I also disagree with most everything else you said, but I will just focus on math for the moment.
Engineers and scientists, yes, but these are a small percentage of the population; scientists maybe 0.5%, engineers maybe 5%.
"Also, most finance jobs involve math far beyond algebra."
No, they don't. A lot of finance people can't understand the Capital Asset Pricing Model, let alone anything more complicated. "... if you really do like math then banking is NOT for you, it’s a joke quantitatively." - http://www.mergersandinquisitions.com/investment-banking-sal...
If you're a truly care about pure mathematican, than you would go to an actual university and study to become part of the scholar class.
Beyond that, I don't really care much about being a "participatory citizen" nonsense because I don't believe in democracy or writing pointless letters to politicans, but I do care a lot about civic because I am an anarchist, not an apolitical person. I don't know the approriate place to teach it but I suspect that is simply the duty of parents.
I can't unequivocally say that innumeracy = poverty, but my hunch is its damn close.
While I wouldn't quite go as far as Heinlein does, his opinion on the matter seems to be:
Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe and not make messes in the house.
-- Lazarus Long, "Time Enough for Love"For some reason a book is never as good when you have to read it. Especially if you have to read it at the same pace as the rest of the class, and discuss it in patronizing detail during class.
If you don't agree, post about it. Don't mod down.
Mod to 0 for an incorrect comment (maybe -1, sometimes), but no lower. Lower is only for spam and things like "lol", "me too", etc.
I very much disagree. My degree is in mathematics and my day job is programming, yet by far the most useful course I took in high school was English lit.
Being able to critically read a text, understand and analyze it and write a well structured and well reasoned response in reasonably competent English is easily the most useful thing i learned in high school.
Far too many times have I (tried to) read papers by probably very smart people only to be completely bogged down in horrible structure, dire grammar and and badly constructed arguments that as written are logically flawed. I can't help but to think that these scientist would have been far better off if they'd paid more attention in English class.
English literature and trigonometry have a place in schools, but teaching them has an opportunity cost. If a student can recite Hamlet's famous soliloquy, but can't manage his finances, then he and his school have spent their efforts inefficiently. The same effort could have been redirected to an understanding of the effects of compound interest, and that would have led to a better life for him, his family and for society.
Let's first focus on teaching the essentials to everyone. If we have time and resources to spare after that, then let's teach Shakespeare and trigonometry.
I'm also concerned about the spirit-crushing effect of failing at something. There will always be students who will struggle with trigonometry. With excellent and patient teachers, maybe almost everyone could master it, but we go to education with the teachers we have. A close friend of mine seems traumatized by her experience in high school, particularly with mathematics. It's so unnecessary. She's an artist now; she'll never need trigonometry. Trigonometry might help a fraction of those who learn it, but the experience of attempting and failing it actively harms the fraction of those who can't do it.
I've had a lot of boring and mostly useless basic classes inflicted on me because someone had the bright idea of making everybody learn "the essentials". And because it had to be taught to everybody, naturally it had to be aimed at people who are about one standard deviation below average in intelligence. Remedial classes shouldn't be forced on everyone, but that's what ends up happening.
Two words: premature optimization. Why should everybody have to decide, in their early teens, what career they're going to be doing for the rest of their lives?
> The smartest scientist in the world probably don't need English Literature 101. English literature is probably the scientist know, but is it revelant to his career? No.
Same deal. I'm no fan of English Literature classes -- I'd prefer a comfortable chair and a good book of my own choosing -- but language skills are important, and forcing people to specialize too early has its own downsides.
Incidentally, most math education also counts as premature optimization, where they spend ungodly amounts of time memorizing the procedures for each type of problem in the curriculum. Sure, you'll be able to find X quickly -- but can you actually apply this knowledge? For most people the answer is no. But this miseducation persists because it's easy for teachers and gets good test scores.
A sixteen year old boy doesn't really know what's going to happen during his lifetime. Maybe, one day he would really love to program for a company that specializes in statistics - he would be hopefully lost if he didn’t even know what quadratic equation means.
Another example: in general, you don’t need geography and/or history for your daily job. But you would look pretty stupid if you asked your Swiss customer: “You still have that god save the queen sh*t”.
Reading is not that hard to maintain even. What kind of a social environment the school is to discourage such disinterest in maintaining reading skills? Where is the internet? Where is the texting? Where are the blogs, or the twitter even? Literacy should be stronger than ever before.
Mathematics? For god sake, what reason do we need to learn useless concept like cosine, sine, and tanget and how to do the quadratic equation? What everyone probably need is an education on how to manage their money and do financial calculation, but beyond that, it is mostly unneccesary. I serously doubt business manager, nails shop, and musicians need to know that.
Programmers at the very least need to know algebra. If he want to do cooler stuff, he can learn on his own, just like how he learn all his tools and programming languages.
Other field may required lot of mathematics. If you need mathematics for your career, why not take a school specialized in making engineers out of you?
Schools, are the very least an hinderance to the economy. It is a test, a fake test at that. It have nothing to very little to do with the performance of our economy.
The smartest scientist in the world probably don't need English Literature 101. English literature is probably the scientist know, but is it revelant to his career? No.
If schools want to be useful to the economy, than make them churn out skilled work force for whatever their economy may need and do it well. We would still have schools like grammatica and mathematics that will equip people with the basic essential(Let face it, it is hard to go anywhere without learning how to write and read and do basic mathematics)
For those who still want a scholar's education(English, Social Science, Alegbra, the work), well...you still have the money to pay for such an education, right?
Let forget all the government beucracry, rules, and abritary grading guideline and start schools like the Hacker School where young and old alike get to learn technologies and skills in fast and furious courses like the Art of Unit Testing or Rails boot camp or whatever.
Our profession doesn't have guilds or unions, occupancy licensure, and all that bullshits that other professions have. If we program, than we're programmers.
If some bold hackers can show the world a successful example of a trade school where teachers teach because they know their stuff and teach well not because of their bullshit degrees and license that said they're teachers. This can be an example to other field to replicate.
Than our frailing education system will begin to rebound and starts to produce workers who are not quadratic equation walking calculator but can actually do real work!
Now, all we need is a little less regulations(actually just abolish all laws regarding education) and the privization of government run schools and their so called educational standard.