School Sucks Project self-knowledge, self-education, self-mastery
We watch and discuss a short TEDTalk by John Bennett called Why Math Instruction Is Unnecessary.
Tags math john bennett TED
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Math instruction is one of the most senseless obfuscations of something useful that I can think about in school. I believe I read something, probably in Gatto’s work, where he traces the history of the “new math” and essentially shows how it was one of the first subjects to be screwed up on purpose.
I think the way to undo the destruction is to start little children measuring things as early as possible. As soon as they are interested in questions like how big, how much, how tall, put a tape measure in their hands. Then as soon as they begin to compare, start with math.
The sad thing is that the important functional math concepts have all been moved to other “subjects”, like science, where they clutter up the formulas for clear thinking. Personally, I didn’t like math at all through my k-12 public school sentence. I hated it until I learned physics and then suddenly began to teach myself everything I could right up to calculus. I couldn’t believe that the answers to such beautiful questions could be found. For example, how much water flows through a pipe when the walls exert friction and slow down the flow rates near the edges?
Hi John,
Kalid does an excellent job of recontectualizing mathematics and presenting the essence of math material in an intuitive way at his website…
BetterExplained.com
“Number rules the universe.”
~Pythagoras
Of course learning real math in context is critically important, that’s why the Debt-Money Monopolists decontextualized it and dumbed it down.
Interesting show guys. I do enjoy the free flow of the live shows but I also feel like you neglected to elaborate on the title topic. This was the first school sucks tv episode I’ve watched and I couldn’t help but notice and I have to inquire. What are you smoking?