As someone who loves math, I do think math education would benefit from making the primary focus be probability and statistics for high school. In addition, financial math instead of algebra. I would replace trigonometry and geometry with discrete math as electives. And have calculus as another elective but taught without a focus on calculation.
As someone who went to economics school and had roundabout the math curriculum you suggested, I think it was a terrible idea. It leaves one with the wrong idea that math is mostly about handling money. Only later, when I got to study math for the computer science degree, I realized that financial math is only a small part of this marvelous huge pie of knowledge.
Thanks for sharing your experience. I do think it’s more important for most students to understand money than most of what is currently taught with algebra, geometry, trigonometry, and calculus. My main point though was to focus on probability and statistics. Right now, most students barely understand and remember what is currently taught and also lack knowledge to understand important matters that directly affect them.
