Statistics is more important than calculus?

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I completely agree with this guy. He isn't talking about math needed at the college level. He's talking about the math that EVERYBODY needs- and needs to learn before they graduate highschool.

Few people will use calculus either at work or in their everyday lives.

EVERYBODY will use statistics throughout their lives but the vast majority will use statistics incorrectly. He isn't talking about statistics at the graduate level. He's talking about statistics at the very simple level that so many people use wrongly when they buy lottery tickets or misinterpret data in magazine articles or fall for the article writer's deliberate misinterpretation of data. People get duped, swindeled and just plain misled at the store, the bank, the doctor's office, the ballot box because few people have even a basic understanding of statistics.

That's what he's trying to fix. And I think he's right.

In school and uni I got on better with statistics than calculus.

If you want to be a good lawyer or politician(or any other profession that can find success through lies) statistics is much more important.

I honestly wish basic statistics was required by all American high schools. I am so tired of people that think correlation means causation it makes my head hurt.

... anyways I don't put one type of math over another. It is all important.

I had an introduction course in probability and statistics in HS for one semester years ago.

Sure sounds good. Most problems people have with understanding statistics is that their math basis is so bad that it really doesn't matter. If the basics are not somewhat solid then it does not help to teach someone statistics when they don't know 10% and 0.1 are the same. The guy has a good idea at the HS level (that's how my HS taught - prob/stat before calc I) but he is going to need 110% effort to pull it off.

Nearly everyone uses Calculus at some point. They just don't know it. Find the area of .... a square. Or calculating how many more hours until we get to grandma's house.

Sounds like the best solution is to offer both.

At some point (depending on your textbook or prof) in applied maths, you can't do prob/stats without calculus. As to the fundamental theorem in calculus, remember that it took Reimann and analysis to finally prove it.

In the real world (which I have little exposure to), stats are probably much more important. But in my little version of reality, Runge Kutta solvers and ODEs show up as often as the central limit theorem. My focus is on applied maths, however, so I see a wide variety of methods from the world of probability and statistics, as well as graph theory, plus Fourier analysis (calc required, of course), finite element analysis, PSO, etc.

I'm still waiting for neurosciecne to pin down how the human brain performs the ODEs involved in throwing or catching a ball. I doubt there's any ODEs involved; instead, the brain just uses some heuristic that evolved to be good enough in the real world.