Wright brothers never went to college and their high school and grade school math gave them a superior understanding of mathematics and physics—more so than any colleges can today.
Math classes were excellent—even only six years of “education” gave you superior English and math skills prior to the evil communist John Dewey who, along with the Fabian Socialists, destroyed American “education” for social engineering and mass indoctrination and Pavlovian conditioning into socialism (anti-Christian ideology). Ben Franklin was done with “school” by age 12 and probably started school at 8. Thomas Jefferson was in law school by 16 or so and he was excellent in math, and other languages, plus superior in English skills. He was tutored.
Orville and Wilber didn’t need “college” math to figure out that all the physics and mathematics concerning flight on gliders, etc. was WRONG......because they went to schools that taught Classical math/English, etc.—not the dumbed-down system Dewey put in to destroy the minds of children (on purpose).
John Saxon created a Math curriculum in the 80s or so because he was SHOCKED at how stupid the grade school/high school system made everyone in math-— that children graduating from high school were ignorant when it came to mathematics and worse in physics. A lot of homeschool children use the Saxon Method.
The school system destroys virtue formation in children intentionally, so they can never be good at anything-—no virtue—no ability to learn and master anything.
I knew there was a reason I hated the Dewey Decimal System when I was learning how to navigate a library when I was a kid.
Just what did he do? That's all we learned about; never anything about the man.
“...Orville and Wilbur didn’t need “college” math to figure out that all the physics and mathematics concerning flight on gliders, etc. was WRONG......because they went to schools that taught Classical math/English, etc.—not the dumbed-down system Dewey put in to destroy the minds of children (on purpose). …”
The Wright Brothers did not turn the entire science of aeronautics upside down because they had undergone some (allegedly superior) pre-Deweyian instruction in mathematics, nor in physics. Cheerleading for some pre-Progressive notion of education on the basis of what they did is not only historically inaccurate, it’s an intellectually dishonest, underhanded attempt puff up the education system of the latter 1/3 of the 19th century by infusing it with virtues it did not possess.
The Wright Brothers possessed talents and fought their way to insights marking them as innovators at a level of genius no system of learning could conceive of - neither then nor now. And they were at bottom practical empirical sorts, willing to take results of actual experiments at face value when they contradicted “Settled Science” and the weight of Accepted Authority.
There wasn’t a whole lot of science in those days anyway, in aerodynamics. So they did not have to go very far to extend the body of knowledge and the sum total of understanding. We have to remember that human understanding of physics was still in a primitive state circa 1900: atomic theory did not yet exist, and no one knew how or why gases remained gaseous, liquids flowed as they did, nor how solids kept their shapes. And “Classical” math was very shortly found to have no applicability to physics, as the explanation of the photoelectric effect and the theories of quantum mechanics became codified.
On top of being very careful observers, the Wrights were in a sense fearless experimenters. Their invention of the wind tunnel revolutionized the study of aerodynamics to a degree almost impossible to overstate, down to this very day. Having found on the “open market” no readily available powerplants of sufficient performance and low enough weight to meet their requirements, they designed their own gasoline engine - the like of which had not been seen up until then - and had a major share in the process of its actual manufacture.
But their real genius lay in the flash of inspiration that the “secret” of powered flight lay in controllability: they found they had to control their machine in all three axes of motion, and they invented systems to let them do so. It was an insight that no other airplane inventor of that period truly understood until years after the Wrights had been flying in public, repeatedly wowing crowds at home and in Europe with their prowess and precision.
From these advances grew the entire modern discipline of systems engineering - an activity as indispensable to aircraft design as aerodynamics. The nation was fortunate that there were enough other scientists and engineers around whose thinking was flexible enough to grasp what the Wrights had done, and whose egoes were not so big that they were unable to begin to do their part in advancing the art and science. In spite of such favorable initial conditions, progress remained painful, slow, and punctuated with danger. When we speak of moving objects like airplanes, the risk never goes away completely.
Not one bit of it had anything to do with Christianity, nor with “virtue formation” as conservatives are pleased to ballyhoo it. To claim otherwise is to attempt to hitch a ride on the coattails of people who actually did something. An unpaid ride.
Best math ever! If you're a parent and want to homeschool your kids, use the Saxon program. It's easy to teach, and very good at the fundementals.