[aozgaa]

Calculus is useful to make rigorous statements in stats. How do you relate the pdf/cdf of a continuous probability distribution without calculus?

Agreed that “memorize rules” is not a great learning experience for students… but it is easy to present.

[dotopotoro]

Point0. Learning without any memorization… I’m not sure if that is possible. One must hold several concepts inside the head to learn new ones.

Point1. Education system which would strive for bear minimum outcome would be something like “not everybody needs addition, cashiers can take care of that”. (You will cut calculus, somebody else will cut multiplication table)

Point2. which iq range education system is optimised for? (Fair discission; though hard politically). Gifted people are random in population. If you teach and test only the bare minimum content, which 99.9% of population passes with flying colors, then gifted are undertrained and also harder to spot, thus under-utilised.

Point3. Memorization is useful. Even if one understands the concept deeply, the “cheat sheet” inside the head (i.e. memorised info) makes things much much faster. Memorization is abit like muscle-memory and or caching.

[epgui]

I think Point0 and Point3 are currently underappreciated. For all the failings of today’s public education, I believe things used to be “worse” as far as rote memorization went.

The problems with rote learning are obvious, and I don’t mean to dismiss them. But I do think the pendulum has swung so far that today, there is excessive and harmful stigma attached to it. Rote learning is a bit of a leap of faith, and it requires trusting that it will be useful in the end (in other words it comes with an upfront cost)… and this is incredibly powerful for taking some academic shortcuts in a limited amount of time.

[Agentlien]

I always despised rote learning as a student because I mostly read things once and then remember them. It felt so stupid being forced to solve the same problems again and again. I'd already seen them!

Now, as an adult, I've noticed how much faster I can get past a lot of tricky issues in my work because the patterns I see a lot are familiar and I can glance over them because I know them by heart and don't get stuck on every little detail.

[zoolily]

The use of probability distributions and calculus in introductory statistics is a historical artifact. See my comment above about resampling approaches.