False dilemma. Probability and statistics involve calculus. Areas under curves, anyone?
Really? I don't need to know how an engine works to drive a car. I also don't need to know how to integrate exp(-x^2) in order to be able to check whether a variable follows a Normal distribution.
And I've always found calculus more fun. Probability and statistics were about lists of data pertaining to experiments on rats, or tricky combinatorial problems that I can't do; calculus was about cool stuff like limits and infinity.
This almost certainly makes you massively abnormal (I'm abnormal in approximately the same direction). We should not be optmising a general school curriculum for weird people who think stuff like limits is cool and prefer abstract explanations to concrete ones.
Normal distributions and exp(-x^2) are sort of the exceptional case. Any reasonable study of probability and statistics will include probability density functions, which you can't talk about at all unless you explain integrals.
Of course, exp(-x^2) is harder to integrate than most pdfs (naturally occurring or artificial) that you'd run into. I wouldn't expect someone who learned enough calculus to understand integrals to know enough to integrate it. But before teaching someone to look values up in a table, I would want them to understand that the probabilit...
This guy says that the problem is that high-school math education is structured to prepare people to learn calculus in their freshman year of college. But only a small minority of students ever takes calculus, and an even smaller minority ever uses it. And not many people ever make much use of pre-calc subjects like algebra, trig, or analytic geometry.
Instead, high-school math should be structured to prepare people to learn statistics. Probability and basic statistics, he argues, are not only more generally useful than calculus, they are also more fun.
I have to agree with him. What do the people here think?