I don't have a problem with the pure math crowd doing their own thing. They absolutely discover some amazing things using their techniques. What I have a problem with is that these people write the math textbooks. Why are we bamboozling our poor children with this impractical, esoteric, overcomplicated, pseudo-religious, gobbledygook? Primary and secondary school mathematics need to change focus to applied and computational math.
Since I haven't been in a K-12 math classroom in about 10 years (contemplated becoming a teacher and visited some friends' classes), what's the gobbledygook we're teaching kids these days? I don't recall any gobbledygook from my years in K-12 education (excepting an awful, awful long-term substitute teacher). Arithmetic and algebra (K-8, basically), geometry, trig, and calc were all practical and applied (the latter two in advanced science courses and work rather than daily life).
I think more probability and statistics courses would be easily justified. Regarding computational thinking, math in the K-12 level is computational thinking more than it's based on proof construction. Computational thinking should be added as a subset of the math and science courses. I think it helped many of my college classmates who weren't in CS to understand computational thinking when we ran simulations using matlab of experiments, or in the reverse used it to process our results.
