If you have completed your high-school education, you have obviously learned math. Likewise, math is an extremely important part of our lives – it exists in so many places, it is literally omnipresent and called the “language of nature.” In the middle of this ubiquitous field of study, there exists a core which is almost the basis for every nook and cranny of math that you can find. That’s calculus. So it would seem very logical for students learning math, to know calculus and this is exactly what our math education puts at the highest priority – to be able to do calculus. When compared to the vast history of mathematics and the advent of calculus, probability and statistics were made rather recently. However, just because its history isn’t that long, doesn’t mean that it’s not worth competition.
To begin with, when compared with calculus, these days, probability and statistics is used much more frequently than calculus. But in a kind of philosophical sense, calculus is everywhere. The distance everything moves is calculus. Volume, area…Considering the fact that our thought processing is done by neurons shooting out messages to each other; even our thoughts are calculus. However the statement that it is everywhere is only true when you are trying to dig out the origins of natural phenomena and principles. When put in a practical point of view, essentially probability and statistics is used much more extensively in many fields than calculus. Just by looking at every kind of industry you can think of, probability and statistics is an essential part of it. For instance, before any kind of industry attempts to make a new kind of product to sell to a particular region, they have to study about the tastes of the people of that particular region, what price range those people would be willing to pay for etc. Actually, they would have to check absolutely everything if they were discreet and everything – yes, everything would include statistics. Without studying some kind of statistically valid data, it would seem almost foolish to attempt to make a new kind of product.
Secondly, the practicality of probability and statistics is far more than calculus. In engineering sciences and the pure sciences, obviously calculus is more important - it is the very heart of those sciences. However when it comes to what we use in a daily basis and what our society needs more, the scales definitely tilt to probability and statistics. As a direct example of what would have happened if people studied statistics more, boldly speaking, it might have been possible to have not avoided, but have reduced the damage of the recent economic crisis greatly. Also strictly speaking, statistics is used to predict the future and if possible, there is nothing more important than predicting the future these days. On the other hand, in the case of calculus many people, after painstaking years of learning calculus in their schooldays, mostly forget or find it totally useless in their everyday lives.
Thirdly, the study on how to sort out information so that it becomes data that has meaning to humans is statistics. This means statistics, helps you to acquire information itself, instead of leaving millions of useful samples useless. But not only samples but statistics can categorize things. For instance, by making a statistic of how many times the word “dog” appears in a book, it can be categorized as a book about animals. Of course the process is much more complex in reality with multiple keywords and phrases, but one can see the point.
Calculus is said to be the flower of mathematics. Its importance in mathematics is beyond measurement and every student learning math should know it. However, that does not mean that calculus has to be the aim of all math education, like it is today. If math was to be practically useful by itself, then calculus should be the aim of all math education, no doubt about that. However, things change. In this rapidly ever-developing society we live in, small factors around us are continuously changing. Especially when it comes to electronic devices, things that we were only able to make possible in our imagination are becoming reality every decade. Yet every now and then, colossal global changes occur, which dramatically shape our lives for the better. Perhaps that change just might be the change of math education - the final puzzle piece that makes all the difference in the world.

Arthur Benjamin's formula for changing math education” from www.ted.com)

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