What education is required to be an RN?

Should basic programming courses replace or at least become required complements to pure math courses in a K-12 education?

• Upon reflecting on my K-12 math education, I can't help but wonder if students today are being taught the same repetitive manual mathematical activities such as how to perform long division. In fact, I really wouldn't be surprised if this is still standard practice given the glacially slow pace at which curriculums change. Should schools instead introduce programming sooner and as a required course in schools, possibly even as a "laboratory" course for pure maths? It seems to me that teaching these tedious math activities are a generally a waste of time and only serve to kill a student's desire to learn math and explore related fields. For example, one doesn't need to know how to perform long division by hand to be taught how to construct higher order functions using the division primitive. Turning basic math education into an applied math education seems like it would be more engaging for students because it would be a "building" activity, instead of a "derivation" and "math for math's sake" activity. What do you guys think? Should programming, such as functional programming with Scheme, become a required part of the math curriculum in schools and should we abandon repetitive and tedious math activities that may have made sense before the near universal ubiquity of powerful calculators? Pros? Cons? This is a follow-up question to .

• Answer:

  Programming courses should be taught in K-12 education, but unfortunately at this time I don't foresee that they ever will be. It probably should not be in the math department, but rather a new department about logic and critical thinking. I would settle for - and be pretty happy about - a required proficiency in Excel (or another spreadsheet program) including formulas and cell referencing.