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Bryan makes a pretty good point in my opinion. And not even just about math, but education in general. For all of our technological advances, we seem woefully s

Bryan makes a pretty good point in my opinion. And not even just about math, but education in general. For all of our technological advances, we seem woefully short of figuring out the best way to educate a human being, identifying their talents, and making the experience useful and enlightening. And it does feel like there's a lot of labor and energy going into teaching subjects that for the most part, people never use again. Some people argue that it teaches you the meta-skill of learning how to learn, but if that was true, you could literally just teach the meta-skill itself, instead of teaching it indirectly. And in some ways I sort of get that at the end of the day, what you're really trying to do is predict the future; what skills will be relevant to which people and so you go with a shotgun approach and go deeper and broader than most people will need, just in case. Maybe efficiency is overrated. Maybe it's better to waste time learning about things you may not necessarily use. But I do wonder what the opposite approach would look like.

SyzygistSix 4y ago
>Bryan makes a pretty good point in my opinion. And not even just about math, but education in general. For all of our technological advances, we seem woefully short of figuring out the best way to educate a human being, identifying their talents, and making the experience useful and enlightening. If that was his central point, I would agree. >Some people argue that it teaches you the meta-skill of learning how to learn, but if that was true, you could literally just teach the meta-skill itself, instead of teaching it indirectly. I think it is. And I sucked at math in school. I think it is a meta-skill every bit as much as reading is and nearly as important. But so are some of the other soft skills that we are not teaching kids.
rimliu 4y ago
I wonder, why do people got to gym. How often do they need to lift barbell or run in real life? Math is workout for the brains and also teaches how to analyse and solve problems. Maybe that's just a useless skill, what do I know, I was good at math.

SyzygistSix 4y ago

>Bryan makes a pretty good point in my opinion. And not even just about math, but education in general. For all of our technological advances, we seem woefully short of figuring out the best way to educate a human being, identifying their talents, and making the experience useful and enlightening. If that was his central point, I would agree. >Some people argue that it teaches you the meta-skill of learning how to learn, but if that was true, you could literally just teach the meta-skill itself, instead of teaching it indirectly. I think it is. And I sucked at math in school. I think it is a meta-skill every bit as much as reading is and nearly as important. But so are some of the other soft skills that we are not teaching kids.

rimliu 4y ago

I wonder, why do people got to gym. How often do they need to lift barbell or run in real life? Math is workout for the brains and also teaches how to analyse and solve problems. Maybe that's just a useless skill, what do I know, I was good at math.