SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Mathematician Keith Devlin writes about how the capabilities to work with maths have changed since the late 1960s. He summarizes what he considers to be the essential skills and knowledge that people can focus on as more and more is turned over to software.
The shift began with the introduction of the digital arithmetic calculator in the 1960s, which rendered obsolete the need for humans to master the ancient art of mental arithmetical calculation. Over the succeeding decades, the scope of algorithms developed to perform mathematical procedures steadily expanded, culminating in the creation of desktop and cloud-based mathematical computation systems that can execute pretty well any mathematical procedure, solving—accurately and in a fraction of a second—any mathematical problem formulated with sufficient precision (a bar that allows in all the exam questions I and any other math student faced throughout our entire school and university careers).
So what, then, remains in mathematics that people need to master? The answer is, the set of skills required to make effective use of those powerful new (procedural) mathematical tools we can access from our smartphone. Whereas it used to be the case that humans had to master the computational skills required to carry out various mathematical procedures (adding and multiplying numbers, inverting matrices, solving polynomial equations, differentiating analytic functions, solving differential equations, etc.), what is required today is a sufficiently deep understanding of all those procedures, and the underlying concepts they are built on, in order to know when, and how, to use those digitally-implemented tools effectively, productively, and safely.
Source : What Scientific Term or Concept Ought to be More Widely Known?
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Monday February 05 2018, @06:28PM
This.
Schools like to skate over the basics of science, things like the very definition of science, and dwell on the details. Sure, they cover the scientific method, but in about the same manner as a construction worker is introduced to a new tool. Barely mentioned is the crucial distinction between the natural and the supernatural, and the concept of objective reality. The classic philosophy questions "what is the meaning of life?" and "why are we here?" are entirely overlooked in K-12 school, put off and relegated to college philosophy as if that's specialized knowledge of interest only to those majoring in philosophy. Even "why is 1+1 equal to 2?" is not taken seriously, at best begged with the idea of mathematical axioms. Incompleteness is not mentioned. Reasoning is not well taught.
Perhaps religious conservatives are responsible for keeping the philosophy of science out of high school, as they surely understand it would make imposing their dogma a lot harder. Their attacks on the Theory of Evolution are not really attacks on evolution, they are attacks on science. Trying to show them tons of evidence in support of evolution misses the point, not addressing their contention that we can't know that an intelligent designer isn't faking us out.
Another possibility is that scientific philosophy is too hard for the teachers. Consequently, they shy away from it. If it hasn't been done, we could use a high or even middle school level class on it. If teachers really are the "those who can't do, teach" people, they would indeed have a rough time grappling with a difficult subject such as scientific philosophy. It should be possible to make it much less difficult, suitable for middle school students.
Or, perhaps educators count too much on the extremely impressive scientific advances and the technology that has spawned and with which we've surrounded ourselves, to make the case far more powerfully than mere lectures ever could.
A seemingly unrelated deficiency is that most people are abysmal at personal finance. It's badly taught, or not taught at all. There's a lot more to the subject than the math, though number sense is pretty important for figuring out whether a financial proposal is a good deal or not.