Should high-schoolers study calculus? Not necessarily, according to James Markarian, chief technology officer of SnapLogic. He began thinking about the topic when his 14-year-old daughter was doing precalculus homework, and he was wondering whether the topic was suitable for children her age.
“Students need skills to thrive in the 21st-century workplace, and I’m not convinced calculus is high on that list,” he writes in The Wall Street Journal. “Sure, calculus is essential for some careers, particularly in physics and engineering. But few eighth-graders are set on those fields.”
Markarian suggests that in the new age of data schools should emphasize subjects like statistics and probability. “The Labor Department estimates that ‘statistician’ will be one of the fastest-growing job categories over the next decade, faster than ‘software developer’ and ‘information security analyst,’” he writes, noting that the median salary for a statistician in 2017 was $84,060. “Yet in 2016 nearly 450,000 high-school students took an AP calculus exam. Fewer than half that took the statistics test, and fewer still took an AP exam in computer science.”
He offers this advice for the next generation of high-schoolers: “Statistics is calling. You might like it, and it can get you a good-paying job—in all probability.”
Commenters responding to Markarian’s column weren’t in agreement. Writes Eric Mendenhall, “The learning process strengthens and expands the mind; in some cases this is more important than the exact nature of the subject matter. Manipulation of abstractions is needed for many pursuits requiring a high level of cognitive ability, job related or not, and learning calculus ‘strengthens’ these ‘muscles.’”
“The author doesn’t realize the fundamental nature of calculus,” Nick Weil. “A basic understanding of calculus is a pre-requisite for analyzing our physical world. Measurements of position, velocity, acceleration sound like they only belong in a physics lab but in truth they are part of the fabric of the natural world underlying everything. If anything, we should teach basic calculus even earlier!”
Several readers questioned how a student could do well in probability and statistics without having studied calculus. Chris Fallen writes, “I know we teach statistics without calculus now … but it shows.” And Michael Bromley notes that if you do well in calculus, you’ll ace statistics and probability.
