Another teacher asked me an interesting question today. "What do you think about this idea of replacing calculus with statistics. After all statistics is more useful."
That's probably true on the surface, but I can't say I'm a huge fan of the "replace calc with stats" craze... even as I lament the poor understanding many people have of stats. It's obvious we need more education on interpreting datasets and visualizations.
But, there is a subtext to this argument I dislike. 1/
The subtext is that statistics is somehow "easier" than calculus since it's more connected to the "real world" --
But, nothing about real world problems is easy. Real world problems are harder, require more experience, more analysis, are less susceptible to canned techniques and strategies.
And more importantly it's hard to really understand much about statistics without knowing some calculus. Not a popular opinion. I know. 2/
But there is an even more fundamental danger in trying to quickly pull away from calculus to some other math subject as the "capstone" of most programs. I don't think many of the people considering the change understand the magnitude of what they are trying to do.
Calculus has been refined and developed as subject for math education for decades and decades. From theory to problem sets huge sets of material have been refined by thousands of people-- stats isn't so well developed. 3/
If the argument is that stats ought to be that well developed I agree.
I also think that working with data sets, and reading data presentations should be a bigger part of social sciences education, and science education.
But it's not like there is a fully formed educational version of statistics that exists that could be dropped in to replace all the things that calculus is trying to do... at the moment.
4/4
@futurebird I'm puzzled by the claim that there isn't "a fully formed educational version of statistics." It's confusing to me because it seems like statistics is already offered at the high school level as an elective in some cases and regularly offered at the college level, with some form often being required for biological and social science students. So it seems like the educational methodology should be reasonably well developed. But, admittedly, you would know better than I.
