That story reminds me of the opposite argument; that the real reason you are taught things like algebra in school is because you won’t have much of a use for them; it produces a pretense of education while avoiding teaching you anything that might make you harder to exploit, like statistics. Corporations and politicians don’t try to fool you with bad algebra, they try to fool you with bad statistics. It’s the same principle as teaching kids history that avoids any issues relevant to modern times, or teaching them biology that doesn’t mention evolution.
This is just silly, if you want to teach students how to think logically, you should teach logic and not teach algebra and hope they pick up logic as a byproduct. This is like having a basketball coach teach kids soccer in hopes they learn footwork that can be applied to basketball.
The real answer is that most jobs involve sitting for long periods doing something boring. Thus school prepares people for this by training them to sit for long periods while doing something boring. High school weeds out the unmotivated, the SAT weeds out the dumb, and college weeds out the undisciplined. If you can survive all that you get a diploma that says you are (relatively) motivated, smart, and disciplined.
My kids are both in university right now and they change every time I see them. They’re learning how to find information, how to think, how to argue, how to consider if a point is worth arguing, how to manage their time and money, how to plan and how to execute a plan. All that without ever touching on their subject matter.
emphasis mine
Yes. It is not hard to teach yourself how to program, it is a lot harder to teach yourself how to program well. Taking a class on data structures - even better, teaching a class on data structures - has served me well for 40 years.
Nearly all the facts I learned in college are obsolete. None of the concepts are.
The other thing is that it is a bit presumptuous to think you know everything before doing to high school or college. I went to high school long before there were PCs, and I got exposed to a computer which I got to program in machine language there. It changed my life. I got exposed to microprogramming my senior year of college in an elective grad level class. That changed my life also. My kids are both doing things they never expected to do when they entered college. None of it is basket weaving, by the way.
And of course there is all the history and literature and other cool things you get exposed to in high school and college, which can be the starting point for lots of personal exploration.
Nailed it.
I find this entire line of thinking utterly bizarre. Especially on a board dedicated to “fighting ignorance.” Do people really think that 4 years of education from certified instructors at an acredited institution is somehow inferior to the home-spun philosophies and pontifications they pick up on random blogs and message boards that only serve to reinforce what they already think they know?
Well, is everything always all it’s cracked up to be? I don’t think anyone claims that nothing useful ever happens for anyone in high school or college, just that perhaps it’s not as ubiquitously useful as it is claimed to or could be, or that its primary use is in a different manner (exposure to a certain set of peers, certification of ability to do busywork) than is commonly proposed, or, well, a bunch of things. I think you are decrying a strawman.
Put another way: Should everyone go get a Masters degree? A Ph.D.? Two Ph.D.s? Do you really think the home-spun philosophies and ad hoc rationalizations you pick up on the job and random conversations, serving only to reinforce the existing corporate culture, could possibly be any better than further years of education from certified instructors at an accredited institution? How could anything in the world possibly ever be better than years of education from certified instructors at an accredited institution?
That’s complete and utter BS! IF he wanted to give a REAL answer to why algebra is useful he SHOULD’VE said: “Say somebody orders a fast food meal that costs $6.30, and they hand you a $10, how much change do you owe them?” Oh, you DO realize that college grads earn $1,000,000 more, on average, than non-college grads?
I suppose you could call that algebra, but most people would call it mere arithmetic; “basic numeracy”, as I said above…
I do think algebra can be quite useful to many people, and it’s a shame many people do not feel comfortable with it. I also think it’s perfectly plausible to get on in your life without mastering algebra class, and since, for the most part, the only people who seem to get value out of it are those who have some level of interest in learning it, we might as well not force those who hate it to take it.
I agree with everything you said! You put it WAY less snarkily than I did!
I don’t understand what’s so crazy about the idea of a person needing to know something because they may actually need to use it in the future, despite what they may think at the time.
When I was a kid, I wanted to be a life scientist of some type. Didn’t know the specifics, didn’t have a crystal-clear “image” of what I’d be doing, but I knew I liked plants and animals, peering into microscopes, and getting dirty.
When I took algebra in high school, I remember thinking to myself, “This is crazy! I’m never going to need this! I’m going to be working with kittens and puppies!”
And as the years went by, I was right. I only needed algebra to get through calculus, yet another “useless” subject.
That is, until my first assignment at my first “real” job. I was given a guidance manual on how to assess a particular water quality parameter (chlorophyll), based on state/federal regulations. It gave step by step instructions on what radio buttons to press in a computer program and how to set up the spreadsheet full of numbers. OK, so far, so good. But then I get to the last step, where you’re supposed to construct a reference curve using two variables. And all that’s provided to describe the function is a complicated algebraic equation. The instructions provided the value for “b”. And I needed to solve for “a”.
I searched that freaking manual for hours, thinking there was no way EPA would publish an unsolved algebra problem in a guidance manual. But incredibly, it had. I had to solve for “a” and I had to do it right then, 'cuz my first deadline was approaching. And everyone was just waiting for the new girl to fail!
So I got some scratch paper and went to town. It took me about 30 minutes to remember what to do, but I did it. (I was so proud of myself!)
As an eighth grader, I would have never thought biologists had to know advanced math. If you had asked me then, I would have said that biologists spend their days playing with cute little bunny rabbits and butterflies. (I never said I was a smart eighth grader :)). So if I had been given a choice, I would have loaded up on bunny rabbit and butterfly classes and slacked on the math. So it’s a good thing they have required courses in high school and college.
A neophyte does not know which skills and tools they’ll need to be successful in their field. A neophyte may not even know what their “field” is, really.
Geez. All the hate for Algebra. I just don’t get it
I use basic Algebra all the time in regular life. It plays in to purchasing decisions, budgeting choices and finding billing discrepancies. Now calculus? When have I ever needed to find the solution to one of those problems! 
And where were you trained to do that (i.e. learn new things through books, tutorials, etc)?
Also, how do you think your employer knew you had that ability?
It’s not crazy, but I don’t advocate teaching random subjects scattershot to students who don’t currently wish to study them, just for the small minority who might change their minds in the future. It seems grossly inefficient, particularly given how difficult it has always seemed to me to actually impart genuine, lasting knowledge on a topic to someone who doesn’t care to acquire it, and how much we are led to simply throw up our hands and distort our standards for what counts as knowledge acquisition. I would much prefer allowing people to study what they want, when they want, while making it easy at any point to take up interest in a new subject and learn it as desired (for adults as well as children).
Is the basic algebra you use things like “5x + 7 = 8; solve for x”? Because I think everyone should understand that sort of thing conceptually, and would classify it under basic numeracy; I also think I wouldn’t consider that a different subject from understanding subtraction and division.
Or is the basic algebra you use things like “Factor the polynomial x^3 + 8x^2 + 19x + 12, graph it, and then determine for which values of x this will be positive”? Because while I also wish everyone understood things like this, I have to acknowledge that kids are perfectly free to not care about things like this and their lives will be perfectly fine all the same.
Because the prevailing wisdom seems to be that high school and university education is important for a good and successful career.
I haven’t consciously chosen to use or not use things I “learned” at school in my professional life.
Then high school and university failed me.
As someone else in this thread has alluded to, I don’t “learn” anything when topics of no interest to me are forced upon me, on someone else’s schedule.
If that’s honestly your arguement, then high school and university taught me how not to learn new things.
The point of scattershotting knowledge at young people would be, IMO, to introduce them to a vast array of subjects so that they can figure out what they like, what they don’t like, what comes easy to them and what is fiendishly difficult no matter how hard they try in the first place.
How is a kid supposed to take an interest in anything if nobody has told him what it was ?
Not that I’d dump on general knowledge for its own sake, though. There are very, very few careers where you need to know anything whatsoever about Ancient Egypt. Indeed, you probably won’t even need to know what an Egypt is and what it eats in the winter. Many people seem to be just fine being blissfully unaware or ignoring just about everything lying outside of their little life-bubble, past or present.
I liked learning about Ancient Egypt. If I had a kid, perish the thought, I wish he’d learn about these wonderfully crazy people too, not how to change a tire or something.
The only “real”, practical, you-have-to-learn-this-for-later skill that definitely should be taught is fluent English (if you live in a non-Anglophone country, obviously), because it’s the trade and technological language of the world as of right now, and you can’t just pick it up from a website later, on the job. When the Chinese take over, I’ll advocate teaching Mandarin.
Everything else, if you need it you can figure it out then ; and your first employers will expect you to suck at it for a while anyway.