This is flawed on many levels and I'd love to unpack it, but I just deflated all my energy getting super irate at people wanting me to be nice to racists. https://twitter.com/JustinAion/status/1325090644969328645

First, let's get the disclaimers out of the way.

1) math is awesome and we should all take as much math as possible because of how awesome and fun it is.

2) statistical literacy is extremely important for all members of society, statistics themselves can also be useful.

What's the deal with calculus?

Besides being awesome and amazing and fun, calculus can be thought of as a capstone to high school mathematics.

Calculus is overwhelmingly difficult to memorize your way through, which is how many people get through most math classes, but it's actually exceptionally straightforward if you have the classes of algebra and geometry pretty firmly understood.

So calculus acts as a sieve for mathematics students in the sense that if you understand math, calculus is just the next step on a firmly built bridge, but if not, then you're building a rickety stairway to the unknown step-by-step and taking out steps behind you.

Geometry is nice to have for understanding theoretical statistics, and the fact that logic sections are usually put in geometry means that it probably should be before statistics for the logic section alone, but neither geometry nor algebra 2 is necessary for statistical literacy

So since statistical literacy is a necessity, it should take place as early as possible (and ideally across multiple years), putting it in grade 9 for advance track students and grade 10 for the usual track (after algebra 1).

But statistical literacy is more critical reasoning, understanding, logic, and things like that. When we push statistics into high school, we more frequently have them taught by teachers without a background in it and they seem to resort to computation over understanding.

But statistics on its own does not do the job of incorporating and making high school mathematics understandable. Ideally, statistics (instead of statistical literacy) should be taught AFTER calculus, since calculus explains how much of stats actually works.

Anyway, these are just some off-the-cuff observations. Calculus is super important, statistical literacy is super important. Statistics should not replace calculus. Instead, get better teachers (and pay them more).

Most importantly, we need to engender love and appreciation of mathematics in children and adults. There's a culture war that math is losing and it's hurting all of society as a consequence.