Just what exactly is the optimization target here?
I'm tempted to say "fun".
(Could be an availability heuristic at work: I'm working through Smullyan's "To Mock a Mockingbird" and having lots of fun. Still, if you make math fun, people will want more of it than if you make it dry, boring and utilitarian.)
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?