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> there isn't much value in teaching them more complex formulas without also teaching them the needed background to properly understand those formulas. We'll j

> there isn't much value in teaching them more complex formulas without also teaching them the needed background to properly understand those formulas. We'll just have to agree to disagree. I believe with a strong background in algebra and simply knowing how to take an integral and derivative you can go far in stats. Will you be an expert? Obviously not, but high school level stats knowledge can easily be attained.

Jensson 5y ago
But what is the point? Formulas get forgotten, the class needs to teach them a concept or it wont stick. Calculus at least teaches people how to think about rate of change and slopes, what would a statistics class teach? Probabilities and event chains is already in the base curriculum before calculus, so it isn't that, and I don't see how learning about the normal distribution and the formulas for different statistical tests would help them at all in life. The people who need it already takes statistics, and nobody else needs to learn those formulas, and just learning those formulas doesn't teach you to understand statistics (as we can see how they get heavily abused in every non-quantitative field). Edit: Now from this discussion, I just realized that the fields that abuse statistics a lot are also the fields that doesn't require you to learn calculus. So maybe calculus is needed to understand statistics after all?