A couple of weeks ago, somebody I know took a basic civil-service type math test as part of a local government job application. Maybe fifty candidates were seated at desks in an auditorium. Before the test began, the instruction page explained how to answer a sample question, which happened to involve multiplying two negative numbers. One jobseeker looked at the sample question with surprise, and whispered to the guy sitting next to him: "Multiply a negative and a negative? Can you even do that?"
I'm all for optimizing the educational experience of the most talented students. But "high-school math education" implies math education for the bottom half of the bell curve as well. I'd agree with the original post, as long as its understood that, for most students, we're talking about very, very basic probability and statistics. The difference between the Bayesian and frequentist approach isn't even on the table.
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?