School spends a long time “wasting” our time but learning things is a great way to learn how to interpret information and make actual informed decisions
School spends a long time “wasting” our time but learning things is a great way to learn how to interpret information and make actual informed decisions
Yep. We don’t teach kids math so they can learn to do math. We do it so they can develop an intuition for abstract reasoning.
Also sometimes it actually just is good to know maths. Engineers, researchers, actuaries, accountants…there’s a huge range of practical applications for maths that’s more complicated than basic arithmetic in a very direct fashion, before you even get into jobs that more indirectly use abstract reasoning learnt through high school maths.
Sure. And for the 90% of kids who correctly say they won’t use math, it doesn’t matter. We are doing math so they can learn to navigate formal systems of reasoning. We could honestly teach deductive logic instead, or set theory, or group theory, or finite field topology. It doesn’t have to be algebra or anything remotely practical.
All of these are maths, though?
Abstract versus applied math. It looks different. More like studying numberless patterns and proof methods.
yeah i dont know how i couldve survived without eigen vectors
How could I forget about eigenvalues?
First of all no, school fails miserably at actually teaching anyone to learn effectively, so that’s not why they do that. Second, they could just as effectively teach kids how to learn by teaching them things that are actually useful. I would’ve loved to have classes for note taking and studying, critical thinking, maintenance and repair… instead I’ve had to teach myself all of those things, meanwhile my school was too busy making me read about Victorian era dress styles to teach me any of that. Even math beyond algebra 1 is fairly niche and is probably better taught specifically to the people who need it. I’m in comp sci, I use that math all the time, but my friend getting his master’s in plant breeding probably doesn’t need to be intimately familiar with calculus.
It feels better to tell ourselves that all of the years wasted by school are actually for something but the reality is that school just does kind of a bad job at equipping people with the skills they need, and it needs to be improved dramatically.
Abstract reasoning is the most “useful” intellectual ability you can have. However, the most important would be the normative insights we usually call “wisdom” (which isn’t taught but learned — for instance by reading literature and living life with curiosity). Critical thinking and other philosophy goes without saying.