On school curriculum

In the National Post this weekend, Kathryn Blaze Carlson presents a story about changes and potential changes to the school curriculum that have occurred in the last 40 years, as well as things that may be disappearing from the schools because they are deemed to be of little value in the modern era.  I don’t agree with all of this.

Cursive Writing

This is important because people need to learn to at least sign their name, and the current state of people’s signatures leaves a lot to be desired.  Also, cursive writing is a lot faster than printing when one does have to write with a pen and paper…  Technology may be making it easier to avoid writing by hand (look at all the university students with laptops in lectures typing out notes), but I think that cursive writing is still a useful skill.  On the other hand, it doesn’t need to be returned to the level of focus it had 30 years ago when I learned it.

Prime Numbers

Primes by themselves are useless and don’t make much sense to teach to school children.  But number theory (a much larger field) could do with some coverage in the middle schools and high schools to help students understand the fundamentals of mathematics.

Radial Clocks

Radial clocks still exist in many places (check office conference rooms, school rooms, etc).  It would be terrible if my children couldn’t read Big Ben in London…  Additionally, learning only how to read a digital clock has resulted in children not understanding such common statements as a quarter to nine.  Especially since they confuse a quarter of currency (25 cents) with a quarter of an hour (15 minutes).  This also relates back to number theory, because a clock is a base 60 counting system…

Logarithms and the like

This one bothered me a lot – because why would you want to talk about prime numbers but not logarithms.  I also laughed at the print edition of the Post because they misspelled the word as “logorithms”.

Logarithms and trigonometry are fundamental to anyone who wants to study sciences, engineering, medicine, business, anything having to do with computers or many trades.  Yes, we have machines that do the heavy lifting of calculating these numbers but understanding what they mean and the concepts of different bases is important.  Particularly important is of course the value e (2.718), the base of natural logarithms and a key part of Euler’s magical formula.   So these should stay in the secondary school curriculum…

Home Economics and Shop

These too are valuable because even students who are going to go into a more academic subjects need to be able to take care of themselves without Mom around – and Shop provides them with the idea that they can actually BUILD and FIX stuff.  Many an engineer I’ve worked with spent a lot of time doing math and science and number crunching in their academic careers, but would have benefited from taking a short course in welding, machinery and even wood shop to get a better sense of physical reality.

Assigned Reading

Letting students choose their own reading material is questionable, because the teachers cannot be expected to read all these books, nor understand what the student might learn from reading them.  Forcing students to read some “classics”, especially Shakespeare provides not just a common literary background, but allows students to learn from the teacher what the nuances and learnings of the literature are.  That won’t happen with every student reading a different book and not having a teacher to point out the nuances.

Long Division

This has to stay!!!  How else are students supposed to learn how to divide large numbers?  Or are we just supposed to create a generation of people who can’t program the computers that do the heavy lifting?   Now, admittedly most programmers don’t have to worry about HOW the computer actually divides (I don’t know exactly what procedure it uses) but leaving students to be baffled by division sounds like a stupid idea.

Additionally, the logic of long division is used in algebra to factor polynomials.  While that isn’t something that many people need to do, it is an important part of pre-calculus that needs to be covered before a student gets to university.

I’ve discussed education before, and I wish people would stop trying to fix something that has worked well for at least a hundred years…  Be careful before you take anything OUT of the curriculum that relates to fundamental reading, writing and mathematics.