

How to Fix Our Math Education - darshan
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/25/opinion/how-to-fix-our-math-education.html?src=me&ref=general

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bluekeybox
_professional mathematicians, physicists and engineers need to know all this,
but most citizens would be better served by studying how mortgages are priced,
how computers are programmed and how the statistical results of a medical
trial are to be understood._

This illustrates that authors have no idea what they are talking about. I
worked at a clinical lab at one point, and it is downright _scary_ that the
people who interpret your medical trials do not know how to calculate a
standard deviation without using a TI calculator. Basically these people were
not very good at math or abstract reasoning, yet they were taught _the
procedure_ how to calculate some particular result after a clinical trial, so
they would abide by this procedure as if it was a holy incantation, which
shows that in reality had no idea what they were doing, which is completely
scary.

You don't fix math education by teaching less math.

