How Can We Make American Students Smarter?

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Originally Posted by sikander

Stop them from using calculators before college .

While this is probably not a legit post, I feel the need to comment anyhow.

On the contrary, I think we should be teaching students HOW to use calculators before they enter college. We've had them since the 1970s. It's fine to learn the fundamentals of arithmetic at an early age, but beyond that, it's useless to sit and do things manually when calculators are so readily available. I think people should be able to do simple computations and estimations in their heads, but there's no need to be doing long division on paper.