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Plasmon comments on What is wrong with mathematics education? - Less Wrong
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Why not teach the basics of calculus and statistics in high school? I was taught both subjects (and more) in high school, which was not at all unusual in this country (though education reforms have now reduced the amount of mathematics taught in high school).
If you had lived in an era before literacy became common, and someone made this argument to argue against teaching literacy to everyone, what would you have answered?
Before literacy became common, were there institutions in place to educate everyone in a population on a set of topics? (I do not know the historical answer to this question, but suspect not.)
I think the answer is 'yes' simply because the best way to educate everyone is to make them literate first. The institutions that taught children to read and write were always the same ones that taught them anything else.
Historically, there were educational environments that didn't teach literacy - like vocational training for various professions - but none of those were, or could be, universal.
Religion, right?
True, the lack of infrastructure may have been a valid argument against attempting to make everyone literate.
In general, people who want any subject "X" taught in schools will argue against arguments of the form "X will only be usefull for a small fraction of students; therefore, we should teach less X" by saying that the benefits of a society in which a large fraction of people understand "X" outweigh the apparent lack of utility of "X" to most individuals. The less practical use "X" has, the more strongly "X"-proponents tend to argue this. Let's call this the anti-utilitarian heuristic.
Let me carefully distinguish between calculus as (1) "laborious integration or differentiation by hands using various techniques that are usually memorized instead of understood" as opposed to (2) "actually understanding the concept of integration and differentiation". Almost no one would deny that (2) has a large amount of practical use, and that, alas, a large amount of people lack even that. I think that a basic understanding of calculus, i.e. (2), is sufficiently useful (to individuals and to society), that we should take the anti-utilitarian heuristic seriousely.