Retired teacher here. I taught math, among other things.
I could mention the usual problems: lack of classroom discipline, social promotions, etc. And they’re all true.
Here’s one more: over-reliance on calculators.
Back when I first started teaching, students had the times tables memorized. And we taught things like estimating, adding fractions by hand, and use of logarithms.
That’s all gone now. In the district where I taught, central administrators actually forbade teachers from telling students to memorize the times tables. Everything HAD to be done by calculator.
So now we have young people who can’t immediately tell you what 8x9 is.
Crazy.
when I was in school we had flash cards and calculators were banned because at $200 not all the families could afford them.
I brought in a slide rule and they banned that too, Those Facists.
when my kids went to school they taught math a totally different way than I learned no more adding large numbers from right to left and carry the one, but somehow from left to right which I never understood.
“Here’s one more: over-reliance on calculators.”
Specifically, the calculator in phones. That is a huge reason. If you have a phone, you don’t need to carry much between your ears.
Yes.
This generates huge problem.
If you learn to calculate by hand, you can actually estimate the result and correct yourself, if you make calculator typo.
If you just use the calculator, any crap which the calculator shows, looks reasonable to you.
When I took statistics in college, we were not allowed to use calculators. We had to make a times table chart. Fortunately I learned how to do that in elementary school (Catholic).
After spending some years in the work force, I decided to go back to school. I took some basic math to get my brain focused.
There were high school student graduates who could not add, or even use the calculators on the desks.
I’m old enough to have been just starting HS when Texas Instruments came out with the SR-10 calculator (red LED display, did square roots, exponential notation). I recall paying $104 for it, and I was one of only 3-4 students in freshman Chemistry who had a calculator. Others used slide rules. The cost of it at the time stopped others from getting one, and it was really an unfair advantage, allowing me to get through all of the extra credit problems, which no one using manual methods could get through. The price of calculators fell fast enough that by the next semester, the entire class had them, and the advantage disappeared.