SF: Algebra is officially on The City's March ballot

[Bernardo de La Paz]

10. Math and all academic courses SHOULD be challenging

Children are naturally curious. Challenge them and you get them involved.

If you give unchallenging curriculum, children get bored and disengaged and start losing out.

Courses can't be "enlightening and helpful and consequential and integrated" unless they are challenging.

Your post has some meaningful perspectives but does not support your title. I do disagree that solving equations is a useless skill. You write better equations if you know how to solve them. You can program computers better if you know how to solve equations. You can use computers to solve equations better if you know how to solve them yourself.

Teaching kids how to punch numbers into a computer is not teaching them what it all means. Similarly it does not equip them to be able to double check the results. Further, it gives no education on how to generate equations in the first place. It is a bogus educational strategy.

Tools do not mean you can neglect fundamentals. Fundamentals are foundations and absolutely remain important. Your strategy would not work.

Your last paragraph is insightful, but is not an argument for abandoning learning how to solve equations. New Math, which I was given decades ago in Canada in the first wave of it, was very useful and did not abandon equations.