Where is balance Academic priorities 257

Barb,

Ordinarily I would agree with you, but we have gone to extraordinary efforts to get the kids to look at all identifiable sides of things, some of which typically require some serious analysis to see if they are real.

With a top-down education, the order is almost reversed - what people would ordinarily think as college prep often comes very early.

We treated our kids as nearly as adults as possible, which presented some real challenges. However, their range of experience has actually been wider than any adults that I know, so their education has been similarly wide.

My point is that adults have even LESS need for math skills than kids raised this way.

Note the one of my kids, Eddie, is the co-author of my FP proposal than some PhD mathematicians I know. However, he still can't do a simple calculus problem, except numerically, though he can tell you what the equation means in words. He just picks up what he needs as he needs it.

Most kids who construct things end up wanting-needing trigonometry, which is exactly when they need to learn it.

No, they get very different "sniffs". Eddie is working on an unsupervised neural network and is learning as he goes. Why waste a precious year or two on calculus when you can get it all from a table of integrals, when he can use that time to learn some really USEFUL things.

My daughter can make an HP financial calculator do EVERYTHING in its repertoire and she understands all these things MUCH better than I do, though she can't do hardly any of the computations without the calculator. However, most of these computations are SO complex that you couldn't do them without a computer or calculator either! She sees her own future in management.

In short, the curriculum in our schools is about a century out of date. Numerical methods now usually work better than analytical methods, yet our schools spend years teaching analytical methods and usually *NO* time on the subtleties of numerical methods. I didn't learn Runga Kutta until COLLEGE! This should be taught just after algebra.

You OBVIOUSLY haven't looked at schools lately. They have RADICALLY transformed into a propaganda conduit. Many points of view are now ILLEGAL to discuss in schools.

Our basic method of broadening their exposure was to demand "equal TV time" where half of what they watched had to be some sort of semi-educational TV show (the definition was intentionally broad, e.g. including fictional movies set in historically accurate settings, but not "series" shows like "Little House on the Prairie"). This meant that if they wanted to see a movie, that they had to scan the schedule to identify equal time in educational programs that they liked. Given the hundreds of channels on Satellite TV, there was never any shortage of suitable shows, with History and Discovery channels being the most popular.

We had special rules for sitcoms and anything with a laugh track. To watch these shows, they had to first give a brief (1-2 minute) presentation before the show regarding what sorts of hidden messages there might be, and another brief presentation after the show discussing what hidden messages there actually were - similar to Table Topics at a Toastmasters meeting. Once they learned to watch for the hidden messages, it started becoming VERY clear how these mess up our collective social thinking.

In summary, the problem is the other way around - being stuck in school, kids CLEARLY don't get enough exposure to the world. This underlies some really serious things, like our society's present insane support for the "War On Terror".

Steve Richfie1d