What is wrong with the teaching of statistics?

Publisher Summary The idea common amongst pure mathematicians that a highly sophisticated logical approach is appropriate for the young reaches its extreme in an experimental course prepared by the School Mathematics Study Group of the USA for 7th and 8th grades. In this course, nonmetric geometry, for example, is introduced by considering a line as a set of points. This leads immediately to hairsplitting and conventions in terminology of the most tiresome kind. Thus, a finite line is termed a segment, a line infinite in one direction a ray if with its end point, a half-line if without its end point. The chapter presents other optional special subjects of interest to the statistician are numerical analysis, mathematics of operations research, and digital computers.