this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2025
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What's important to note is that there has been a big shift in the goals and techniques of education. This most famously occured with "common core" math in the US. It was a push to teach math in a more intuitive way, one that directly corresponds with what children already know. You can physically add things together by putting more of them together, and then counting them, so they try to teach addition with that analog in mind.
Prior to common core math, there was "new math," which anyone under 80 years old assumes has always been the standard. New math was a push to teach math in a more understandable way, one that gradually introduced new concepts to ensure children understood how math works. This was satirized by Tom Leher in his song "New Math." If you look up the song, you'll see that new math mostly was implemented by teaching students how base-10 positional notation works, and then using that understanding to present addition and subtraction as logical algorithms.
Prior to new math, the focus of math education was much more about getting the right answer, rather than the skills needed for problem solving using math. This allows for a higher breadth of education, as topics can be covered quickly, but each topic is understood in a shallow way.
There are so many people online with no pedagogical training who rail against common core, but a lot of it is trying to bring education standards to be more skills based rather than whatever they were doing back in the day. Like high school English classes have standards like "can cite textual evidence to support identification of the theme of a text", rather than shit like my old essays that teachers marked up like "missing comma, minus 0.5 points".
Or training what so ever. I'm not sure how I finished a physics degree, but I'll see a common core question that's effectively about associative or distributive properties of multiplication and someone saying that's not a thing. Often the kind of person that says algebra is obscured by the letters and one should just stick with numbers.
Which incidentally that example is the critical thinking everyone demanded schools teach
It's kinda funny because that larger trend is paralleled by my own personal trend. Back in grade school, I thought the math answer keys were useful information, useful enough to make learning it unnecessary.
Later on, I realized that the answers were meaningless without the context of the problem and put equal importance on the process as the solution.
These days, the solutions themselves are mostly just curiosities and it's all in the process, which parallels life itself nicely.
Or in the context of video games, one frame displayed on the screen shows millions of results of a bunch of math being repetitively done as you play. Those solutions only matter for a brief instant before new ones are needed and the previous ones often just discarded, though occasionally saved and even sent out to the world for others to appreciate the brief moment they are relevant.