In Oklahoma, the requirement usually is up to “algebra 2” - this is mostly domain and range, finding roots of polynomials, and logarithms.
IMHO, the world would be better if calculus was a required part of the high school curriculum. Like yeah, most people aren’t going to need the product rule in day to day life, but the fundamental ideas about rates of change seem like they’re something that everyone human deserves to be exposed to.
Yeah, I feel like what you’re asking for would have to be a more holistic thing, like the concept of rates of change could be covered in physics quite naturally alongside momentum/impulse.
I have a math minor so have taken through calc 3, abstract algebra, and quite a bit of matrix math. Like 90% of concepts from those classes wouldn’t really help people in the world around them, not just “they won’t use integrals daily” but rather they won’t be taught in a way where they’ll connect differentials to what they see in the world or news.
Now, Finland, they have the right idea. They’re teaching classes on spotting disinformation and how to find trustable answers. That seems way more important to me and likely to have a higher impact.
That’s one of the things I find most disappointing about the education system. Like, people technically pass classes that are supposed to ensure they’ve “mastered” certain concepts, but few seem to even notice how they could be applied outside a narrow scope of specifically worded problems. Its so strange hearing people say things like “unless I’m like a math teacher, this is all useless for me outside of class” when calculus specifically was something that I could immediately connect to problems I had outside school immediately.
Even when taking classes that seem to be designed around trying to build real-world problem-solving skills, the classes generally seem to devolve into teachers teaching an algorithm for solving a hyper-specific question, assigning homework doing those hyper-specific question types over and over, and then testing on those hyper-specific questions with different numbers. Those students seem to be virtually no better at identifying how to apply math to real-world problems after such courses…