> We'll be fine, your children aren't you, they'll find their own passions.

There's an Unschooling group on Facebook I watch. If you search "calculus" you get threads where a parent asks how their kid is going to learn calculus and the answers are mostly "when did you need calculus after high school." Aside from needing it for college, my answer would be "why am I raising my kid to be a 1:1 clone of me and not someone with a lot of different options." So I dig this as an answer. The world has ended a billion times already. People who work hard pursuing a skilled passion have never been obsolete.

Calculus is entry level math for all the hard sciences, engineering, and finance. It's how to think about how things change over time. Understanding what integrals and derivatives look like, especially as graphs, is very practical knowledge. Being able to think about compound interest and acceleration under gravity as driven by the same rules gives an understanding of what's happening underneath.

Whether the infinite-series summation limits are worth knowing is questionable, though. That's more of historical interest.

(But then, I once did a game physics engine and have a patent in that area. I spent a lot of time in the hell which is integration of stiff systems of nonlinear differential equations. Turned out that was the wrong way to approach the problem. Works, but there are better approaches.)

The one-dimensional mentality of anti-intellectualism is absurd. I have heard parents outside of our school but in my community talk down French Immersion programs (versus English schooling) saying that people put their children in for the wrong reasons. I don’t know what the explicit reasons were in this case, but I am assuming that the other parent means academic overachievement.

Learning calculus or French can be beneficial, especially when the glass ceiling in certain workplaces is whether or not you’re bilingual. However, the point that’s getting missed is the metaexperience that consciously or subconsciously shapes the way the child interacts with the world later on.

It's interesting to see different perspectives on this.

For me, calculus was the first math I learned, where symbols represented something other than pure numbers or tangible points on a plane, and we proved things about higher level abstractions. Of course many of the topics had tangible applications, but it was a launching point towards further abstraction in the higher level math courses.

A friend of mine in grad school was a student in medieval church history, but was assigned to teach a freshman course in modern history. For one class session, he asked a math teacher to give a guest lecture on calculus. Then he lectured on its impact on society.

It's true that most people, including managers and engineers, forget their school math not long after school. Their software tools, such as Excel and CAD, can do the math that they need. One can hope without proof that a little bit of mathematical thinking rubbed off on them.

You never know if learning calculus will make you discover new things that you might like to pursue. Also, you never know if you will need it or not apriori. By that logic, you shouldn't learn anything until you need it, wich I think would be a disaster.

I don't think your reasoning is well thought out. You shifted the question from why should someone learn calculus in high school to why someone should learn it in college. I do think that it would be better if most high school students were taught probability and statistics than calculus.

I very much agree with your last sentence.

The classic SMBC: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/why-i-couldn39t-be-a-math-...

Mathematics is fundamental as it shows you there in fact exists a way to spot bullshit with no concern for however much rhetoric is used. Many people would be really and truly shocked to know we can definitively prove things given certain axioms, and not just have "wishy washy" verbal arguments or slogans. Without exposure to mathematical training, nonsense like belief in gods or supernatural thinking tends to increase.

This is the wrong way to think about school education. It's not just to prepare you to use it yourself. For most people it's there to prevent them from being lied to. If you did something as a kid, even if you wouldn't be able to do so now, you know it can't be that hard. So if anyone tries to sell you something saying "oh, don't even look at this part it's just complicated math stuff" you now at least have a chance to spot the BS.

It's the same for pretty much all school education. It gives you a chance to spot the grifters, show-offs, and sleazy salespeople.

I wouldn't be surprised if the unschooling movement was supported by said show-offs, grifters and salespeople. Uneducate the masses and you won't have to come up with clever lies anymore. The simple ones are enough.

Thanks for highlighting that your children aren't you! Easy to forget.

As the parent of a 4 year old, we're allowed to raise them to be mini us until the tell us otherwise, then we can respectfully disengage. Sharing things we're good at and enthusiastic about only helps kindle their enthusiasm for things in general, in my experience.

oookayy, suurre thing boss. Just make sure calculus is one of those "a lot of different options"

Learning what infinitesimals were and how useful they were for understanding the rates of change was an actual eureka moment for me, and many people in my classes felt similarly. It fundamentally changes the way you view things as simple as a car accelerating or the way heat spreads through a system, the way fruits spoil faster in the winter if you have heat, why metals creak when they're cold and why they groan when they're heated.

The thing that really begets me in all of this is that what you describe, working hard pursuing a skilled passion, requires a foundation of knowledge that up until a year ago was considered a foregone conclusion for becoming someone of note. It doesn't matter whether someone learned it autodidactically or through structured schooling, the point is that the knowledge itself is fundamentally important. We never stopped teaching children basic arithmetic or mental math when slide rules, adding machines, and calculators became widespread. The reason why is pretty obvious.

And yet, the technofeudalists want us to stop teaching our children critical thinking, science, arts, technology, and everything else that encompasses the indomitable human spirit, and why? Because a machine can do those things too? Machines have been capable of or better at a great many things that humans are also capable of for the past hundred years or so and yet we have never stopped teaching humans those very things exactly because we used to recognize that those things had enormous utility in general in a sphere far beyond whatever is necessary for your calling or profession. It is absolute lunacy to me that someone could see LLMs and agentic flows do brute-force proofs and then somehow suggest that the entire field of mathematics is obsolete.

I urge you to read the piece "Complex Systems Won't Survive the Competency Crisis." If we lose all of our institutional knowledge of how the puzzle pieces all fit together there will be no one to save us when (when, not if) the systems we're creating now suffer a catastrophic failure. And they will. Model collapse has not happened yet because of luck. Synthetic data can only get you so far. And whenever we enter our Idiocracy/WALL-E stage of total compliance and deference to machines themselves, one day there will come a time when something breaks and no one knows how to fix it because they no longer understand the underlying principles.

You might say in an optimistic scenario you can just ask the LLM for the tools and resources and prior knowledge needed to fix it. Alas in many cases, this is barely enough, and most on this forum are technically knowledgeable enough to actually make use of that advice. It's hard to see a compliant, totally intellectually decrepit population doing the same. I'd also advise you that although unschooling has its benefits, it's a movement that is filled by those who are often cultists and other fringe hacks who have grievances with the school system for reasons unbeknownst to me and many others. I would not use them as any sort of advice forum or channel for meaning, and the fact that you seem to be taking them as gospel is extremely questionable and makes me uneasy about the future of this forum in general.

i mean even basic differentiation is useful for optimization problems.

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