>Yet, only 20% of those surveyed reported using even basic algebra at work, and a lot of those were tradespeople who could have easily been taught the necessary math post-K-10.
I agree with you most 'work' today, especially white-collar but non-professional work is mind-numbing and empty and requires almost no skills of any kind besides a pulse. But that's just work. Have fun teaching people about their retirement plans without algebra. Balancing their budgets/checkbooks. Estimating costs of things. Understanding risk. Making decisions about anything that involves quantity. Should I have to call and pay a professional algebra-expert to understand and make decisions about my credit card? How will I know if he overcharges me?
>This is an ideological statement more than anything else. I can just as easily say it's much more important for educated citizens to learn history and philosophy, so they can understand how the social structures around them work.
Of course it's ideological; the entire project of education based on a mix of ideology and a purely a capitalist endeavor designed to provide government subsidized job training for tomorrow's workers. I absolutely agree with you about history and philosophy, but we aren't talking about removing history or philosophy from the curriculum, we are talking about removing science and mathematics. I think /every/ student should learn physics and biology and philosophy and history and rhetoric and statistics at least at a rudimentary level -- half of which require, among other things, mathematics.
Having a sense of how something generally is from what you learned a long time ago in high school is intangible but very valuable. Does it really matter where or what Asia is, or whether or not it's a continent? Does it matter whether America was founded 200 years ago or 2000 years ago? Does it matter what the Bill of Rights says? For the vast majority of people, no. But it's important to have a sense for the world as it is. The universal children's curriculum is a tiny slice of human knowledge given to everyone so that nobody is as ignorant in any topic (save perhaps subsistence farming) as the humans of 1000 years ago were. That's called progress.
>I think it's a lot more useful to teach a kid that here are fallacious ways of trying to prove a point--something they can use in real life--than teaching them about the periodic table or cell division
Informal logic and rhetoric would be a welcome addition to a curriculum that often doesn't include any sort of philosophical reasoning at all, I agree. But I think it's useful for a different reason. Argumentation is NEVER about deductive reasoning or being correct in real life, which is why formal deduction and logic is completely useless outside of a classroom -- even more useless than the periodic table or cell division. Real life is only about persuasion. And the list of logical fallacies is a list of effective persuasive techniques: if they weren't effective ways to fallaciously argue nobody would ever bother mentioning them. So I'm a little torn on teaching high school students lists of highly effective rhetorical weapons. I've seen the consequences of having them unleashed on internet commenters and the results so far are grim.