They still need to be taught. Two reasons:
One of the things you figure out as you get older is that a good portion of what you’re taught in school is not for the purposes of making you more knowledgeable, but actually to “help you think”.
Second, if you need to solve something and don’t happen to have a calculator handy, what are you going to do?
Someone, somewhere has to know those methods in order to create the calculators for lazy people to use. If you stop teaching them they fall out of common knowledge and eventually are lost. We’re not teaching the slide rule anymore, but that’s because it’s no longer needed.
“We’re not teaching the slide rule anymore, but that’s because it’s no longer needed.”
I still have one in my truck that I have used for over 50 years, still works and doesn’t require a battery!
“Someone, somewhere has to know those methods in order to create the calculators for lazy people to use. If you stop teaching them they fall out of common knowledge and eventually are lost. We’re not teaching the slide rule anymore, but that’s because it’s no longer needed.”
Very true; I earned an engineering degree using a slide rule (still have it) before calculators were available, and one had to be able to mentally estimate the expected answer in order to know where to put the decimal point. Same with calculators to some degree; otherwise, “fat-fingered” input errors will never be recognized as yielding a wrong answer.
JC