What I’m Listening To: America’s Math Curriculum Doesn’t Add Up (Freakonomics Ep. 391)
The United States education system needs a huge reform. One of the founding differentiators of our countries and in fact a base of most “free” societies has been pushed to the side, underfunded and neglected. And the effects become more and more evident. Our curriculums do little to truly educate Americans and prepare them for the world. Here is an excellent example, and argued with far greater expertise and fluency than I can by Steven Levitt.
ALL people NEED to understand data, probability and statistics. This was a purely elective class for me in high school. I took AP Statistics because I liked math, I had a free period and my high school had a famously awesome Statistics teacher who made the subject totally fun and applicable. (Shout out to Mrs. Smeltzer).
This knowledge has been THE most applicable and helpful I think of any of the courses I’ve taken. Actually being able to make sense of data presented to you to understand it’s relative meaning as well as understanding how to manipulate data (and how easily it can be manipulated) is a skill that everyone would do better to understand. The present COVID-19 where people can’t understand the significance of infection rates and simplistically took the fact that in February there were less Coronavirus deaths in the US than influenza deaths and said “OK, no big deal then!” is just one of many, many examples.