4 ms·

Yeah! And why come we gots to teach kid how to plus and minus if theys just gonna be a plummer?

• zelphirkalt 6y ago
  I think you are not addressing the point, which the GP tried to make. It's not about teaching or not teaching, but about the time when stuff is taught. Surely all these things have their time and place. Perhaps there are gentler introductions to some of these topics available?
  • Jtsummers 6y ago
    If you can't teach theoretical computer science to undergraduate computer science students, you will have to shift it to the graduate level. Which means you won't really every have anyone earning a true masters in computer science because they'll need so much grounding to be able to complete the work they won't have time to do anything novel.
• tzs 6y ago
  You aren't being serious, but that was once actually a fairly widespread sentiment. In colonial times in America, for instance, arithmetic was generally not taught in elementary school. It was something you would learn on the job if needed. Amusingly, when it did start getting routinely taught at the end of the 18th century there were complaints from businessmen to the school boards that the methods taught in school were producing students totally unprepared for business. For more on this, see the essay "What is Mathematics For?" by Underwood Dudley from the May 2010 Notices of the AMS [1]. (A more accurate title, he notes in the first paragraph, would be "What is mathematics education for?"). He makes some interesting points about the usual justifications that elementary and high school math are useful in your career are not really accurate. [1] http://www.ams.org/notices/201005/rtx100500608p.pdf http://www.ams.org/notices/201005/rtx100500608p.pdf