

Sorry Left AND Right, No Job Requires A College Degree - schoper
http://www.forbes.com/sites/johntamny/2013/02/10/sorry-left-and-right-no-job-requires-a-college-degree/

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ColinWright

        President Obama regularly talks up the need for more
        math classes “to equip our children for the future.”
        The latter is odd and a bit dated, particularly when
        we consider that computers and calculators have largely
        made the need for math knowledge something of the past.
    

I recently read a comment saying

    
    
        "Everyone who talks about advanced math think it's
        just more of the most advanced thing they know."
    

Thus if you never did school algebra, you just think advanced math is just
sums with bigger numbers. If you did do school algebra, you think advanced
math is just using more variables in bigger equations. If you did calculus you
just think it's more convoluted differentiation, or integration. If you did
calculus of variations, you think ...

Well, you get the idea.

Yes, computers these days can do arithmetic much better than people can. And
given the equations to manipulate, they can do the school algebra and calculus
better than people can.

But that's neither what advanced math is, nor what advanced math gets used
for.

Sorry Forbes, you certainly don't understand math, or the math. While it may
be true that jobs don't require degrees, in many cases they certainly need the
skills that degrees are supposed to impart. Whether they succeed in that, or
whether they're now just a mill for turning out bits of paper, that's another
question.

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lutusp
A quote from the article: "President Obama regularly talks up the need for
more math classes 'to equip our children for the future.' The latter is odd
and a bit dated, particularly when we consider that computers and calculators
have largely made the need for math knowledge something of the past."

This is absolutely false. What computers and calculators do is arithmetic, not
mathematics. To do math above the trivial, you still need a properly trained
person.

This doesn't argue against the point of the article, which I agree with. But
the fact that calculators and computers can do arithmetic shouldn't be used to
argue against math education. That would be like arguing that, because
computers can spell-check, we no longer need readers, writers or literacy
training.

