Robots are great!

I've been looking up robot-building books on Amazon. It's interesting stuff. I want to build robots now, but I don't have the disposable income. I need a better job, but that's old news.

Anyway, between the robot stuff and my recent thoughts about the importance of education, I have come to a weird conclusion that may entice a lot of young people. There is a common strain of thought throughout this country (and probably others) that math is no longer a useful subject of study. After all, why bother learning math when McDonald's is kind enough to put pictures of their menu items on the register? And for really complex stuff like tax returns, there are cheap and effective pocket calculators. So who cares about math?

The ivory-tower intellectual answer is simple: math promotes thought, and thought is an inherent good. While I don't disagree with the second premise, the first one is a little shaky. Think back to middle school math classes: who really paid any damn attention? Be honest! I didn't think so. So if almost everyone who took math remembers it as a painful experience, where a bunch of meaningless formulas were thrown up on a blackboard (remember blackboards?) and memorized and forgotten, with little lasting effect on one's mind, why bother learning it at all? It doesn't seem to promote much thought, except about that cute girl sitting two rows up. You know, the one who would lean forward in her chair, so you could see the top of her panties? Yeah, you know who I'm talking about.

Back to the subject at hand, I think math should still be taught in schools, but as an elective. It's important to know math, but you have to have an interest in it if you're going to actually get anything useful out of the class. It's like philosophy or football in that respect.

Does this mean we should just put a big gaping hole in students' schedules? No. No it doesn't. We may not need math in the schools the same way we used to, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't teach the students anything. Instead, I propose replacing math with something so similar, that at least one university accepts it in lieu of the math gen ed requirement. Something that students actually crave intellectually, something they'll find immediately useful in their own lives, something that requires no specialized previous knowledge, but which cannot be replaced by any currently existing machine. I propose logic.

Think about this for a second. How many arguments did you get into with your parents in middle and high school? Sucked, didn't it? Wouldn't it have been nice to be able to argue in a way that, instead of ending in the usual "I hate you! You're ruining my life! I wish I was never born!", moved your parents over to your way of thinking? At the very least, if your parents did win the argument, you'd know that they'd done it fair and square, because they're older than you and have more experience with this sort of shit. I think that a good solid logic course in the schools would really capture the students' attention, and show them how to think in a way that math, because of its complexity and rote-learning style, really doesn't.

What's more, logic promotes exactly the same kind of thinking as math. Math, after all, is based on logic, not the other way 'round. Without logic, there is no math. Without math, logic still persists, and must eventually produce math. So even if you believe that math is its own good, an end rather than a means, you should still support the teaching of logic in the schools, since it will lead kids to explore math, if they have any interest in it at all.

There is a downside, of course. Without logic, there'd be fewer huge rants like this one. And do we really want a bunch of whiny, snivelling teens and preteens to have access to modes of thought powerful enough to produce this crap?