While Democrats focus on the liberal arts, which train students to be leftist activists beginning in grade school, it is the STEM studies that keep America functioning. As students ascend that ladder of mathematical logic, calculus becomes central to their ability to maintain our systems and invent new ones. Sadly, though, our schools are failing students, not just in teaching calculus but in teaching everything preceding calculus.

It is widely recognized among today’s undergraduates that the STEM field is at once among the most rewarding and the most challenging, promising well-compensated employment in the future while also demanding devotion and consistent concentration in the present.

A principal source of the demanding nature of the STEM curriculum is its solid mathematical core, the centerpiece of which is calculus, a cause of both delight and frustration for generations of college students.

Calculus, the mathematical analysis of change of continuous functions, was invented in the late 17th century by both Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz, who were working independently of each other. Because Newton’s notational system was awkward and inconvenient, whereas the Leibniz notational system was intuitively appealing and easy to use, it is the Leibniz notation system that is in use today.

Because of the hierarchical structure of the topics in STEM, in which mathematics explains computer science and physics, physics explains chemistry, and chemistry explains biology, calculus finds itself cast in the role of the gatekeeper to STEM. And with that gatekeeper role in mind it would be highly illuminating to be a mouse in the corner of the first quarter college calculus classroom as the professor brings the daily class to a close.

What the mouse will see as the professor announces by word or gesture that the class session is concluded and picks up the whiteboard eraser to clear the board of the extensive computations placed on the whiteboard in the course of the lecture is a flock of four or five students rising to their feet and calling out “Don’t erase!” as they descend upon the professor with a question.

They all have basically the same question. Each student, in turn, will point first to one point in the computations on the board and then to a second point, asking, “How did you get from here to here?”

It is paramount to understand that this question is not a calculus question; rather, it is an algebra question, one arising from the algebra the student was assumed to have mastered in K-12 before enrolling in the college calculus class.

This occurrence is not occasional; it is every day, and the number of students involved is increasing. These are the brains of the operation behind America’s functioning.

From this scenario, two concerns should spring quickly to mind:

(1) Our economy and our sovereignty depend upon a smooth and abundant flow of qualified students through the STEM pipeline.

(2) The recent Nation’s K-12 Report Card tells us that, beginning very early, this pipeline flow is in peril, for wokism is becoming the excuse for teachers who can’t be bothered to reach.

The main point here is that, for the non-genius, competency in college mathematics is cumulative in nature, achieved by incrementally climbing the chain of mathematics, understanding link by link, beginning with counting on the fingers, and ascending years later to calculus. Breaking the chain or skipping links results in later chaos. Therefore, it’s incumbent on math teachers and professors to abstain from skipping over any link in the chain.

Image by Grok.