The Purpose of Education
A friend of mine claimed recently that public education was designed to produce workers for factories. I’m not sure if that completely checks out historically, but it raises an interesting point: what exactly are we educating children for today? If the goal is something closer to equity and social justice, how does the curriculum support that? The mathematics I am teaching is largely the mathematics I was taught in high school, and only bits and parts of it did I ever use in the course of my former gainful high-tech employment. I certainly used the general type of thinking and processes one learns in mathematics: abstraction, analysis, generalization, modeling, and so on. But most of the actual math that needs to be done in the course of business and the business of life is either fairly simple (and not generally the subject of our math education) or very complex and only reached at the graduate level. So what, again, is the real goal with statewide standards for math education? Why is it important that every child knows about complex numbers or the quadratic formula? That sounds like a rhetorical question, but it’s actually serious. And why isn’t the calculation of interest rates on loans or other general business accounting techniques given more emphasis?
A response from my own high school math teacher:
[W]hat you really learned was how to manipulate and work with a system that you didn’t understand to begin with. You learned to learn. The reason so many majors in college require calculus is not because you will be expected to use calculus as a doctor or a nurse or whatever, but to prove that you can learn something that is blessed with many “foggy areas”. Abstract anything is difficult to grasp for most people. The better ones do achieve the ability and that achievement is called learning.
You conclude: And why isn’t the calculation of interest rates on loans or other general business accounting techniques given more emphasis?
The answer to that is that it is a simple arithmetic operation. How many times do you have to do compound interest to understand the concept? What else do we do now?
