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.
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?