OPINION: Our students need up-to-date approaches to math education for a quickly changing world

The calculator has replaced the slide rule. Latin is rarely offered in high school. Sentence diagramming has disappeared from most English classes.

Academic disciplines continually evolve to reflect the latest culture and technology. Why, then, are recent attempts to tinker with the high school math canon eliciting such a backlash? Students deserve a chance to learn up-to-date topics that reflect how mathematics is being used in many fields and industries.

Case in point: the debate over including data science courses as high school math options. Data science courses teach the use of statistical concepts and computer programming to investigate contemporary problems using real-world data sets.

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