A lot of people talk about adult mathematical/statistical illiteracy and how it leads to major problems with cognitive biases, poor decision making, etc. However I haven't seen anything that explicitly ties having had a class in X leading to that person applying X more frequently in their life.
The breakdown as I imagine it is:
1. The top 10-20% of students implement X vaguely into their life
2. The bottom 80-90% merely take the class to pass and forget about X and fail to apply it to their life. They are still prone to cognitive biases because they haven't extrapolated the effectiveness of what they've learned to the real world.
I think generally, at least in America, a general culture of anti-intellectualism prevents people from actively caring about what they learn in school and applying it to the real world. It's not a mere matter of education, it's about making education meaningful to people over the alternative race to the bottom.
Related, there's no evidence that people behave more ethically after taking a course in ethics. But the education system has one hammer, teaching courses about subjects, so every problem looks like a nail. They want their students to behave ethically so for school systems there can be only one solution; they teach ethics courses.
It's likely that the true ethical education children receive is observing the behavior of people in their family and community from a very young age to learn what is or isn't acceptable. Schools can't do much about that, and if anything most modern schools are harmful in this regard because they generally award petty cheating and excuse spinning. And so too do schools teach the wrong approach to critical thinking and cognitive biases. Schools reward students for conforming to what their teachers say and give students trouble when they think on their own. This is particularly true during the youngest grades. Some high-concept courses about critical thinking in highschool won't undo the damage; by that time students already learned to either conform with authority or become equally unthinking reflexively contrarian rebels.
There's confusion over the correlation of education vs ability to make good decisions -- I don't think the causal relationship between learning maths/logic and better decision making is established at all. It could be just that better "general intelligence" enables one to get good grades and also make better decisions, instead of the education having a meaningful impact.
And then there's an oversell of how useful some concepts are. I think it's fair to say that for me personally, I've had more success integrating into my life what I learned about constitutional law than linear algebra. Before this generative AI thing I don't think I've ever used applied any knowledge of linear algebra.
There's a trend of people over-estimating the usefulness of their subject. Mathematicians tend to think everyone else needs to know advanced math. Historians think everyone should learn history. Tech people here think everyone should be more technologically literate. Judges think everyone is supposed to know the law ("ignorantia juris non excusat").
In the end the body of knowledge out there is just too vast, life is too short, and it's actually a good thing that people learn different things, even at expense of being "illiterate" at some subjects. I think the "80-90%" who never integrated the stuff they were taught at school is evidence that they should have the option to learn something else instead of being forced to sit in classes that they don't feel like taking.
While in general I don't condone anti-intellectualism in the sense of being proud of being ignorant, I think to some extent it is a reaction against
forms of out-of-date intellectual-elitism, especially the kind that considers people who took a classical education as superior than those who have not. For example, knowing how to build a house is definitely more useful than knowing the cause of the fall of the Roman Empire, but the house builder is presumably not looking down upon the history major for lack of house-building knowledge. But somehow there is (or at least was) a snobbishness among the educated class that did view the house builder as less "sophisticated". (Of course we all know history majors can end up worse off financially than blue collar workers now, but these days it's the STEM people who still somewhat maintain this elitist attitude and clinging onto century-old math curricula.)
And some people find it hard to accept that the classical education isn't as useful as they claim to be.
> A lot of people talk about adult mathematical/statistical illiteracy and how it leads to major problems with cognitive biases, poor decision making, etc.
Yeah, I find that difficult to imagine too. The assumption behind that seems to be that with the proper statistical knowledge, people are able to understand ... scientific articles? Because I don't really know where else you could find a relation between cognitive bias and knowledge of statistics.
But first, articles have the statistics done. Second, knowing statistics isn't going to make you understand the article, nor spot the errors. Third, most articles still rely on poor statistics, because many of the authors and reviewers still think that e.g. null-hypothesis testing is just fine. As a corollary, most articles are wrong, and should not be used for decision making.
The breakdown as I imagine it is:
1. The top 10-20% of students implement X vaguely into their life
2. The bottom 80-90% merely take the class to pass and forget about X and fail to apply it to their life. They are still prone to cognitive biases because they haven't extrapolated the effectiveness of what they've learned to the real world.
I think generally, at least in America, a general culture of anti-intellectualism prevents people from actively caring about what they learn in school and applying it to the real world. It's not a mere matter of education, it's about making education meaningful to people over the alternative race to the bottom.