3 ms·

Your argument was raised and given a historical context in an interesting article that was posted here a week ago. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5353315

• graycat 14y ago
  Yes, I saw that and considered commenting but didn't because it seemed that the thread was mostly about bringing the 'revolution' to teaching in K-12. A one word description of the revolution is Bourbaki, and I'm not thrilled about seeing that influence K-12. For the 'revolution' good courses in plane geometry or trigonometry are about as close to the revolution as I would want to see. And for first calculus, I believe that the traditional ways are fine -- lots of water flowing from tanks, lots of solids of rotation, lots of pictures and intuition. An alternative would appear to be to drag compact sets and uniform continuity into first calculus, and I would discourage that. Another alternative would be to dispense with Riemann integration and just teach measure theory -- I'd discourage that also. For Bourbaki and 'telegraph style' definitions, theorems, and proofs, I see them as crucial ingredients in the soup but not the whole soup.