NavList:

If what these columnists are saying is even halfway true, then it would be like teaching English with no vocabulary, no grammar, no sentence structure, "just figure it out for yourselves"    We can't teach people to write either creative or factual material without those building blocks, so how can they claim that we can teach math without some basic building blocks?   Gosh, will they not even teach that numbers are base ten but somehow expect children to come up with the concept independently?    

I'm not saying that all we should teach is rote learning without understanding the underlying concepts, but rather "here's a problem (like adding integers) and here's a solution (putting them into an right-aligned column), can you think of any others?"    Or take logarithms -- in these days of $15 scientific calculators, not so important any more for multiplication.   But as a concept ("you can multiply by adding exponents") a very good basis for asking "and what else might you do with them?"

I've asked some Silicon Valley engineer friends with appropriately-aged children if they're really seeing this.

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Read this (and some of the comments):
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/16/the-faulty-logic-of-the-math-wars/

So how much does a "modern" student of navigation depend on arithmetic algorithms? Can you work out a value for the sine of one minute of arc in your head? Should every child learn long division? Or logarithms?

-FER
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