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From:https://www.educationnext.org/do-students-still-need-to-learn-calculus/
Do Students Still Need to Learn Calculus?
In his new book Aftermath, Ted Dintersmith joins a growing chorus of policy wonks, researchers, and advocates who say that the age of calculus is behind us and that future math education should focus entirely on statistics and relevancy to students’ lives. “The tragedy is that 50% of high schools still do offer calculus,” Dintersmith writes. “That we cling to obsolete priorities.”
This approach is misguided. Dintersmith writes engagingly about interesting real-world math applications that may well pique the interest of a high school student. Math teachers should make math interesting! But Dintersmith and others in the anti-calculus camp miss three key realities about math and about education.
Calculus Still Matters
The history of calculus is a tale of humans asking questions that seemed impossible to answer, of chipping away at them over years and decades and centuries, of churning through tedious calculations in the hopes of making even one small step forward. It is the embrace of hard work with no promise of reward—only curiosity about what else the world might have to offer and a determination to uncover its secrets.
Lasers, modern drug therapy, GPS, large language models, and weather forecasts are just some of the ways calculus is used in the world—by you and by me—every day. Sure, it often sits behind layers of computer code. No, the calculus involved isn’t part of the daily discourse about these tools. But it’s there! And it’s impossible to know what other innovations are on the horizon waiting to be discovered by someone who not only loves calculus but knows how to deploy it to push the boundaries of human ingenuity. “For more than 2,500 years, mathematicians have been obsessed with solving for x,” writes mathematician Steven Strogatz. “The story of their struggle to find the roots—the solutions—of increasingly complicated equations is one of the great epics in the history of human thought.”
Dinstersmith is correct that a book about math is a book about “civil society, innovation, education, the universe, [and] the future,” but in purposely excluding calculus from those lofty notions, he both misdiagnoses the causes of students’ disappointing math performance and writes a prescription bound for failure.
Calculus is the gateway to almost everything we have invented in the last century, to the technology that powers the world, and to the large language models to which many people appear willing to surrender their cognition and humanity. To tell kids that calculus doesn’t matter is to deny them access to a tool that has transformed the world around us in their lifetime. The fact that not every kid will take calculus doesn’t make it irrelevant. Dintersmith claims his book will help children “see the relevance, beauty, and power of math.” I, too, want that for all kids. But excluding calculus belies a true commitment to all that math has to offer.
Statistics Is Not a Silver Bullet
Statistics and other data science courses are great. They provide knowledge that employers want and can keep some students engaged in math or STEM courses who might otherwise give up entirely. Whenever the pendulum swings entirely in a new direction, however, we never get the promised result. As Rick Hess wrote way back in 2010, “Reformers get swept up in enthusiasms and manias rather than in problem-solving.” Surrendering calculus, as Dintersmith advocates, will not suddenly result in thousands of high school students successfully completing higher-level math courses. It sounds smart, of course. A rejection of the course that serves as a proxy for the ability to handle elite college coursework! An embrace of 21st-century skills! But less of one thing does not automatically result in more of something else, even more so when the “more” we want is math.
There’s a real case to be made for expanding access to statistics and data science, and the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine is making it: “Broadly, an understanding of data and computing is increasingly required to engage in society in general and in a wide variety of professions including but not limited to careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Increasing the number of people with literacy in data and computing has the potential to enhance civic life, facilitate learning to participate in society, and expand opportunities to improve our world.” The non-profit DataScience4Everyone says 25 percent of job listings today require at least some data science skills, yet 60 percent of employers say they cannot find candidates who have them. Simply prioritizing data literacy over traditional advanced math, however, is unlikely to change either student outcomes or the nature of American civic life. We’ve got to walk and chew gum.
There’s research showing that students who take AP Statistics rather than AP Calculus don’t see a meaningful difference in their long-term earnings. But that research looks at an already self-selecting group of students taking an advanced AP math course. The real benchmark is whether we can increase the number of high school students taking and passing any advanced math at all. Doing that will require an overhaul of how we teach math in elementary school.
The importance of younger students mastering foundational math skills is nowhere to be found in Dintersmith’s book, which leaves the reader without the well-established evidence that early math fluency is essential for later math success. Math, like reading, is a muscle that must be intentionally developed. You first build the cognitive routines so that when the child gets to more advanced topics, he spends minimal time thinking about the addition, multiplication, or factorization they require. Then you can interest students in an array of advanced math courses they can capably pursue. We want high school students ready for advanced math the way an Olympic sprinter is ready for the 100-meter dash—trained, conditioned, and ready to fly.
The idea of “learning by doing,” as Dintersmith describes the pedagogical principle undergirding his book, seems alarmingly similar to several of the “instructional illusions” outlined by learning scientists Paul Kirschner, Carl Hendrick, and Jim Heal in their 2025 book by that name. Whenever someone claims that what students need to succeed is more engagement or motivation, they should be reminded of the common misconceptions around engagement and motivation. Demonstrating math’s relevance might be one tool a teacher uses in developing a lesson plan aimed at building mastery of a complex subject. But ultimately learning is, in the words of one expert teacher, “built on often unpleasant friction: retrieval, reflection, feedback, and practice. Real learning demands focus and time, not constant novelty and high energy.”
Schools should offer statistics and include opportunities for students to explore data science in humanities courses as well as traditional STEM courses. The goal should be to give all children a strong math foundation and the skills to navigate a data-centric world while ensuring every child with the aptitude or interest to pursue advanced math can do so. It’s statistics and calculus. It’s dreaming of kids demanding more math than we could ever hope for. It’s a love for math in a world run by probabilities and integrals alike.
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