"Conrad Wolfram says the part of math we teach -- calculation by hand -- isn't just tedious, it's mostly irrelevant to real mathematics and the real world. He presents his radical idea: teaching kids math through computer programming."
Y'know, maybe what we should really do is to completely decouple "mathematics" from "arithmetic". Arithmetic is useful but boring and you mostly learn it from age 5 to 12. Mathematics is harder, more interesting, and either useful or useless depending on what you eventually do with your life (no doubt 60% of people could go through life without understanding any mathematics at all -- all they need is arithmetic).
http://www.ted.com/talks/conrad_wolfram_teaching_kids_real_m...