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Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield
This seems sensible. But I'd still like to see the shift toward more hard science and math. The argument we should be "well rounded" is bullshit. We should learn to think more critically. That doesn't come with studying history or political science. It comes with being exposed to as much math as possible as early as possible.
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Please. Throughout the 80s, this was the bugaboo about Japan -- they were training their kids in math and science and were going to leave us in the dust. But did the Japanese innovate, or copy (and perfect)? Did they seize on the Internet? No.
I'm not saying that teaching kids how to innovate and think critically, and teaching kids math and science, are antithetical. They aren't. (And, I would bet, the average Japanese student also learned a lot of history and other disciplines too during the 80s.)
Subject matter is one thing, method of thinking is another. You can teach math, science, history, whatever, in a manner that is based on rote memorization and that fails to promote critical thinking. Fails to promote empirical analysis, creativity, experimentation. Or you can teach those subjects in a different way.
We teach kids a well-rounded curriculum for a lot of reasons, but one of them is because doing that promotes learning about a number of different ways to think, a number of different ways to approach problems.
