A new vision for math education

This provocative piece from the magnificent TED website opens an important discussion.
Contributors to that website have begun to process this idea in helpful ways, in the extensive comments section posted with the talk. To take this discussion in another direction, I asked J.B. Shank, an historian of science and mathematics at the University of Minnesota and a frequent guest on The Bat of Minerva, to comment on this suggestion and to place it in historical perspective, thinking about the development of both calculus and probability mathematics in the 17th Century. This excerpt is taken from that wide-ranging interview: