"My Evolving Call for Change"

                My call for change is to integrate math, statistics and basic computer use into primary education on history and social science.  This would prepare our youth to use the data and tools that are available to make a change in the world today.  This idea germinated in 2014 when I was examining my possible carrier choices as a mathematician.  There is almost nothing that one can do with pure mathematics but teach, however, applying mathematics and computer science allows incredible flexibility in working on solutions to almost any meaningful human problem.   I was inspired by the enlightenment figure Thomas Bayes who invented a math theorem related to probability that was totally unusable in his time and for a hundred years after! (Link first blog)   However, once the early ninety’s came about computers had enough computational power to implement his theorem which is now used to improve machine intelligence and, most importantly to me, several statistical projects relating to human wellbeing.

                “The past called for specialization of a field of knowledge like sociology, math, computer programming, economics or statistics.  Those who specialized typically were the more successful in their research as they could focus on something so specific that no one had attempted it before.  Today is the age in which flexibility is the dominantly trait of a world changing researcher.”(See my first blog)

                At this time my focus was on general integration of these subjects at a college level, however, after I spoke with a BYU mathematics education professor who also, like me, had started his academic carrier as a pure mathematician.  At first he discussed how math and statistics can be used to take advantage of the ignorant but then our conversation moved to a subject that changed my goal.  He noted that in colleges people were already realizing the need for social scientists and other researchers to learn math, statistics and computer programming.  However, going from zero to full speed on these very sensitive and detail oriented subjects is hard for people who are not used to them.  Taking a computer programming class at BYU I felt miles behind my fellow students who had been nerdy enough to mess around with computer programming in their teenage and middle school years.  I realized that this needs to start young!  We should not wait until the last possible moment to help the youth to use these powerful modern tools, they need to be integrated into non-math classes well before college.

                “The authority should build up the common man with the understanding they need to critically evaluate numeric data and analysis.  This skill can be taught in mathematics and statistics classes, then also reinforced and applied in social science classes, and it can be done for youth and adolescents as well.” (See my second blog)

                Connecting all of this to history came easily, as math’s history and development has mirrored the expansion of human collaboration, the encouragement of creativity and, finally the development of technology.  The true agent of change that makes my call relevant has been the advent and expansion of digital communication.  Just as printed communication preceded the rise of scientific mathematics in Newton’s time, the digital collection of data has made mathematics applicable to every research field that involves human beings as a subject, because so many of us leave a digital footprint that can be studied using mathematics.  If twitter tweets can be analyzed by a computer algorithm to predict general happiness in a region, a psychologist exploring depression would want to know how to use such an algorithm to his advantage.  So, again I conclude, it’s time to prepare the future generations of researchers from the youngest age possible.

Update

To make my call for change more specific will require the work of some educators with more experience than me for the nitty-gritty details, however I will paint some broad ideas for my vision of the future.  I believe that children should learn some basic computer skills in excel and see how to do story problems with hard numbers on a computer and how to reason through them.   Also, using teleology as more than just a resource for storing and recording knowledge in classrooms in primary and secondary education would be key.  Students should use a computer to get numeric data about a social, economic or psychological trend, manipulate and explore that data a bit using computers and then draw some conclusions and write about them.  Those projects would best prepare the rising generation to help use modern tools to solve society's problems.

As to whether or not this would be too much of a burden on children I would like to say that some children are overwhelmed by education and others are bored with the level of education that they are receiving in public schools.  College is not for everyone, neither is becoming a leader in solving the future's social problems.  Students who show aptitude need to know how to use these tools, students who are going to do research in the future need to learn this while still young.  My call is more focused on making the future better through education in a very specific area, naturally it does not universally apply.