[Designer]

There is still a good reason to withold pocket calculators from children. One should at least be able to judge whether the numbers are reasonable before relying upon the calculator.

It seems that airline protocols now simply assume the computers are correct.

[Nifster]

yup I agree...one ought to know the order of magnitutde of things...if DC practised this maybe we wouldn’t be TRILLIONS in debt

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

There is still a good reason to withold pocket calculators from children. One should at least be able to judge whether the numbers are reasonable before relying upon the calculator.

There is still excellent reason for that, in that arithmetic numbers are simply names for quantities, and the student needs to learn respect for those quantities and the numbers which represent various quantities. Part of learning the meanings of numbers is learning what processes of addition, subtraction, &c produce what named quantities.

That far and, IMHO, no further. There not being any such occupation as "clark" to tote up columns of figures . . .

Spare me the pedagog who thinks arithmetic and math are coextensive.

It seems that airline protocols now simply assume the computers are correct.

If planes can crash because of inadequate training of crew, the answer in principle can be to idiot proof the process. That does not mean making software which is predicated on the assumption that all input data are valid, rather it requires robust software which takes into account all the characteristics of all aircraft systems. So that if, for example, adding power in a dive can lift the nose of an otherwise unresponsive aircraft and get it out of the dive, then the software would resort to that radical step in the absence of any other viable control input (which I read about having saved lives of many passengers in a prop-driven airliner in long-ago airline disaster).