Calculus Education Debate

"You're not even using calculus!"

Lets say you need to find the probability of something happening 10% of the time to 40% of the time, you need to perform definite integration of the curve ( lets say normal curve ) from 0.1 to 0.4 on the x axis multiplied by the normal curve function. This is one of the easiest examples I could remember from my undergrad. We could solve these problems with ease at undergraduate level because we grinded hard during our high school. And also these type of problems were just a subset of the huge va

I see you did a lot of analysis, but no Calculus, why is that?

What? Americans learn proper calculus in later undergraduate years? Really?

As somebody who aced calculus, what I was effectively doing was just being a human calculator mindlessly applying memorized differentiation and integration rules to get desired result. No real thinking or problem solving, which begs the question of why bother really teaching kids to be machines when machines can do such task. I would imagine the difficulty others had was more due to the way the topic was approached/framed rather than their executive ability to do predetermined tasks.

Is it still worth learning calculus now that there's Mathematica?

I feel like every math class/topic should have a document like this, and it should be covered on day one of the classes. This is WHY you are learning calculus, here are concrete examples of the things you can do with these skills. Not just; "here are some random things out of context that we expect you to know but won't tell you why."

Stats without calculus is like physics without calculus. Sure you can teach high schoolers to memorize displacement and velocity equations without calc but actual derivation and understanding requires calc.

12 hours ago.https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34087556Now I've checked the past link, it appears some people struggle with real numbers or haven't touched any areas needing calculus.2 years ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23949097 3 years ago <a href="htt

It would be better to change the required mathematics curriculum in high school and college to focus more on statistics and less on calculus. Sure it's useful to understand the basic principles underlying calculus. But even in engineering work, only a small fraction of engineers actually use calculus. Statistics is just as good for strengthening the mind, and is more broadly applicable to many real world fields.