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Political Science Prof Asks: Is Algebra Necessary?
Capt.Albatross writes "Andrew Hacker, a professor of Political Science at the City University of New York and author of Higher Education? How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids — and What We Can Do About It, attempts to answer this question in the negative in today's New York Times Sunday Review. His primary claim is that mathematics requirements are prematurely and unreasonably limiting the level of education available to otherwise capable students ."
Yeah, Math is too hard for retards with polisci degrees (100% made-up Industrial Flimflam) so we should just get rid of it.
Lewis Carroll bemoaned the decline in Education in _his day_, which was when Mathematics students were freed from the obligation to read classics.
So, in order to keep the Degradation Train rolling, as if that mother stops, so does Society, let's do Carrol's day one better and remove mathematics. After all, mathematics convinces retarded people that they're not smart enough to get polisci degrees, or something like that.
If you're retarded and no good at math, have hope---just toady on up to a polisci prof, get that nose nice and brown and one day maybe you, too, can be a gutless hack teaching that math is unnecessary!
Screw that, it doesn't matter what algebra is good for. My 5th grade math teacher said this, math helps change the way you think. It doesn't seem like much, but you'll need that way of thinking in the future. And she was right.
They used to make this same argument about Greek and Latin: sure, you may not actually use these skills, but they teach critical thinking and build character. It was nonsense then and it's nonsense now.