Knuth is the poster child for the school of thought that just doing a _lot_ of math problems, especially calculus, is great mental weightlifting and we should make our young students do a lot of math homework. See this interview: https://ia600803.us.archive.org/29/items/conversation-with-k...
I spent hours and hours studying the mathematics book we
used -- Calculus and Analytic geometry by Thomas.
We were assigned only the even-numbered problems, but I
did every single one together with the extras in the back
of the book because I felt so scared. I thought I should
do all of them. I found at first that it was very slow
going, and I worked late at night to do it. I think the
only reason I did this was because I was worried about
passing. But then I found out that after a few months I
could do all of the problems in the same amount of time
that it took the other kids to do just the odd-numbered
ones. I had learned enough about problem solving by that
time that I could gain speed, so it turned out to be very
lucky that I crashed into it real hard at the beginning.
It's important to get down a lot of hours solving problems for the express purpose of improving your mental faculties, improving working memory. So for the finite amount of time you have, what problems do you choose to work on? I think maths and calculus is a great bet. Though I'd rather suggest a young person do Spivak's Calculus as opposed to Thomas' Calculus as Knuth used. You'll notice that most of geniuses we know were spending long periods of time solving problems. I'm kind of scared that we will have less people like Knuth in our people, people who can just go and deepthink and solve _difficult_ problems. If we keep up with this meme of 'no homework' we are in danger.
While it's true that crafts, arts, cleaning, farming, and other jobs exist, it's also worth considering that science, technology, engineering, and mathemathics are world-revolutionizing disciplines.
Not everyone needs to change the world, but there's good argument for throwing all kids at STEM to see which ones stick, because any one of them could end up saving billions of lives.
Please offer the missing insight into how further developments in arts and farming will transform the world comparably to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.
I mean, I can’t predict the future for sure, but I can point to examples in the past and throw out some hypotheticals.
It’s hard to imagine a more impactful invention in today’s world than modern genetic engineering and pesticides (both in good and bad ways). It’s what allows countries like China and India to feed a billion people, it’s why we have 1 farmer feeding hundreds of people, freeing other people to work on things like tech and science, it’s also causing mass ecocide and harmful biological effects. Sure, the personal computer has changed the world, but almost 40% of the world still has no access to computers of any kind, while share of people who don’t rely on genetically engineered food or pesticides is likely under 1% at this point.
Now, you might say “genetic engineering is a scientific invention”, but I don’t think you can meaningfully separate science and agriculture in that way. Scientists who invent genetic engineering techniques rely on farmers to POC and industrialize their inventions in the same way deep learning academics rely on SWEs to industrialize their discoveries.
Some important ideas in agriculture that have the potential to spur revolutions:
Permaculture - could allow people and communities to decrease their reliance on big corps, reduce reliance on oil for transportation in an era where oil is becoming scarcer, make space colonization feasible, eliminate food deserts.
Urban farming - in a revolutionary scenario, this is less about “urban” vs “rural” and more about removing land ownership as a requirement for industrial farming.
Food as leverage for political/economic movements - see Dutch farmer protests for a small example
Similarly, revolutions in art can’t meaningfully be separated from science. Art and industry/science have historically worked in kind of a call and response fashion where science attempts to concretely define human understanding, and artists theorize about things that can’t yet be explained and solved by science.
As an example
artists perfect photorealism -> camera is invented -> modern art is created, which emphasizes aspects of the human experience that can’t be captured by photorealism -> discoveries about how the human brain works (e.g. modern psychiatry, neurology, artificial intelligence) -> postmodernism, a focus on individualism and societal structures -> ???
