Yes, everyone should learn to use a slide rule in high school, and should spend at least a couple months regularly using it for calculations in math/science cla

Yes, everyone should learn to use a slide rule in high school, and should spend at least a couple months regularly using it for calculations in math/science class. As you say, they not only build strong intuition about logarithms, but also help teach about working precision, etc. Handheld electronic calculators should be banned as having almost no pedagogical value. In general assigned problems should be conceptually more challenging but should have simpler numerical values. Anything that needs more calculation than that should be done on a computer with a real keyboard and a real programming language. In primary/middle school, counting boards (like those used in ancient civilizations or medieval Europe) should be used much more than they currently are. Experimenting with these tools is great preparation for thinking about how computers store and manipulate data.