[ExI] Are Social Media to blame for USA political hatreds?

[Dan TheBookMan]

On Tue, Oct 13, 2020 at 2:45 PM spike jones via extropy-chat
<extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
> I noticed over the years a declining dependence on texts.  In the really traditional
> subjects that never change, such as math, they still use the standard texts.  My son
> used the same textbook I did for pre-calculus, 43 years later.  The later editions added
> some stuff, such as coding exercises (in BASIC.)  The edition he used is over 20 years old.

One thing I remember in high school was that the US history textbooks
we used ended with like the beginnings of the Vietnam War. So well
over a generation before I went to school. :) Of course, I don't
recall us even covering much beyond WW2, so it wouldn't have mattered
had they extended further.

I enjoyed math, but I think one problem with traditional teaching of
it is the approach is just learning algorithms and not the why of it
-- other than that they work. In fact, it's really not even in the
first of college that most math is more than that. (Of course, how
much does the average person need to learn here? I reckon if I were
forced to come up with a math curriculum that was meant to serve
people who might never do anything beyond basic algebra, it might be
hard to justify foundational ideas as opposed to simply learning
useful algorithms. One thing I think would be necessary, though, is
teaching statistics, especially common mistakes people (even sometimes
experts) make with them. That would make it easier for the attentive
student to understand and criticize when someone just throws around
stats as if that justifies whatever they're saying.)

Regards,

Dan
  Sample my Kindle books via:
http://author.to/DanUst