Our world is a thousand times more complex than that of even the 1800's. It used to be that your average young man/woman was in one unskilled job for their entire life. One you could learn by the time you were 15-16. This is no longer the case.
Even entry level office jobs jobs now require an understanding of calculus, statistics, excel, etc.
When all that used to be required was knowing how to plow a field, recite wives tales or run a loom.
It isn't as simple as "oh our education system is too slow".
"Even entry level office jobs jobs now require an understanding of calculus, statistics, excel, etc."
This is simply not true. Entry-level office jobs require a piece of paper saying "this dude knows calculus"; they don't actually require the knowledge. If you don't believe me, visit an average office, go around, and ask people to take the derivative of sin(x)*x^2; this is a fairly simple problem which any first-semester calculus student would know how to solve.
Finding derivatives is actually really easy. There are just a few simple rules you have to apply deterministically to any problem, and the answer will pop out.
As I mention above, I bet they wouldn't be able to answer an even simpler question. Requiring application of product rule "raises the bar" a bit too high.
I'm not sure why this is modded down so far, as it raises a good point. If you ask the average entry-level office tech to differentiate x^2 with respect to x, it is likely that they will not even know that. Throw in the product rule, and all bets are off. (I am embarrassed to admit that I had to quickly look at MathWorld to make sure I hadn't misremembered it.)
Technical learning of any sort (looms or calculus) is really the least important consequence of schooling - if it takes 20 years, fine.
The fundamental error is to assume that socialization (for which nearly all humans are genetically optimized) and training in symbolic methods (for which most humans are rather ill-suited) should proceed apace.
I would say yes, the plow is much more simple than excel. However, I disagree that the loom is too. You can do amazing things with a loom if you take the time to learn the complexities of the machine.
Our world is a thousand times more complex than that of even the 1800's. It used to be that your average young man/woman was in one unskilled job for their entire life. One you could learn by the time you were 15-16. This is no longer the case.
Even entry level office jobs jobs now require an understanding of calculus, statistics, excel, etc. When all that used to be required was knowing how to plow a field, recite wives tales or run a loom.
It isn't as simple as "oh our education system is too slow".