I was recently informed that kids are learning algebra in fourth-grade. We all know there is a shortage of people with adequate math skills for today’s jobs. Of the people I know with B.S.’s in math, one sits with an elderly client, two much more intelligent and competent than I are unemployed. One, who died a few weeks ago, was the guy who pushed shopping carts at people as they enter Walmart. I’ve said before, today’s businesses do not want mathematicians, they want people who will pervert the art to trick the uninitiated into believing foregone conclusions. And yes, I still believe the success of the Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution, and even the Sputnik era was the result of replacing fiction with objectivity.

Mike Scruggs wrote a commentary on the mismatch between of technical training programs in America and the needs of society. In my old age, I have had to play dumb to keep jobs. So what if somebody has a 4-year degree in math plus ten years’ teaching experience? I have had bosses tell me how to carry ones while adding columns of numbers, forbid me to do math involving simple fractions or decimals, tell me deposits are money that goes in the bank and withdrawals come out, tell me I must carry the balance in an account to each successive page of a ledger, teach me how to count change, discount calculations that use anything higher than arithmetic, etc., etc., etc.

Yes, we should teach calculus in third grade.