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The basketball excitedly coach asks the team to do 50 pushups every training session. All your average player does is quite rightly ask themselves "What's the
by abdullahkhalids 5y ago
The basketball excitedly coach asks the team to do 50 pushups every training session.
All your average player does is quite rightly ask themselves "What's the *ing point, I'll never do a pushup in a real game".
The purpose of mathematics is to train your mental muscles in a very specific way. Irrespective of whether you use those particular calculations in your later life, doing mathematics generally makes you a better quantitative and formal reasoner. That's the point. And I think a lot of students who are good at mathematics intuitively get this idea. And therefore are excited about studying just math for the sake of math.
- eldenwrong 5y agoNo, the point is to produce constant stream of mediocre workers that support power. The way they teach math in highschool and most colleges is retarded. People succeed despite it and not because of it
- tgv 5y agoDon't you think it would be much easier to teach e.g. astrology or medieval scholastics if you want to produce a stream of mediocre workers that support power? Dictatorships relied on those kind of methods to keep the people in line. We teach math just in case someone gets it, not to make everybody understand it deeply. And we don't only teach maths, but also languages, geography, biology, physics and all the rest. The system is far from perfect, but there are not enough people to teach everybody well. Yet here we are: people are fairly well educated, we can create mRNA vaccins, build tiny supercomputers, and huge vertically landing rockets, and today we read about the relation between one-way functions and Kolgomorov complexity. I think the situation is not that bleak, although the golden age of education might indeed be behind us.
- eldenwrong 5y ago