Yeah, I definitely think that you are spot on with some things just need to be learned because they are useful. Last week I was teaching a seminar on Personal Finance to a group consisting of college students and recent graduates. It was the session on investing and I was trying to go through examples that showed what sequence of returns risk is, why it’s important, and how asset allocation can help. I remember at one point as we were talking about percentages “I know at least a few of you probably consider yourselves allergic to math and are unsure how much you really need to be successful in the ‘real world.’ Based on my experience, you need to know up through basic algebra, and you need to know the various ways of representing the relationships between numbers (e.g. fractions, percentages, ratios, etc.) cold.” It’s definitely important that they can see how much a 20% raise would be by multiplying .2 and their salary and that they can see what their salary would be after the raise by doing 1.2 times their salary.

I would still say that we pass this point fairly early in education. High school kids are stressing out over trigonometry and calculus that they don’t like, will never use, and will forget 16 seconds after they learn it. I think it’s still worth teaching kids those subjects, because the hope is that some kids will fall in love and become great engineers. The catch is, until there is enrollment from the child, academic rigor is not the most important thing. If we’re going to teach math in high school, there should be just enough academic rigor to be able to spot the kids who really “get it,” but the rest should be trying to work with the kids who think they have a math phobia to show them that they have a mind for numbers if they find the right way to approach it. In other words, I think that for the anti-math kids, less rigor and more playfulness is needed. Yes, they might not be exposed to as in-depth of a curriculum, but the goal for these kids shouldn’t be going through the curriculum, the goal should be enrollment. The academic rigor can happen when the ones who want to become engineers declare an engineering or math major. We can make it clear to them that this part of their education will be the hard part and they will have to struggle to understand the material. There will be no games and no coddling. To me, that makes total sense once you have enrollment. With compulsory public education, there is no guaranteed enrollment. It must be earned.