Why aren't schoolchildren taught to count with different number systems other than the decimal system?

I was, in the '70s. Had assignments like

"divide 1356 with 123 in base 7"

Was about 12y old.

We covered different bases in school.

Decimal was a brainless choice. Base 12 is a much better system for basic arithmetic.

It had to do with how many fingers we have.

Why is this glorious thread last on the catalog?

I have other issues with the public school system especially elementary but I would rather not go into 10 post rant.
Only thing I know if I ever have kids is that they are going straight to private schools.

I learned it but it was only provided to kids who did very well on tests or something.
Every Wednesday all the non-brainlets (who were probably just kids who learned math on their own time/had parents who cared) were taken into a seperate room and taught various concepts like Geometry and Number systems.
I remember just liking that for the first time my class was mostly white. I was a very racist kid.

Genuinely curious how they got you to do this, i'd assume conversion to base 10 first at that age.
Anyone out there saying base 8 or 16 is better are not that bright, because they only contain factors of 2 making division shitty for 'decimal places' in those systems.
10 has 2,5 and 12 has 2,3. So 10 is actually a reasonable choice even without considering we have 10 fingers, the next useful one would be 12, if we don't consider 5.

>Comedian makes fun of the idea that schools might teach children how things work, rather than just giving them a script to follow.
I'm actually slightly angry.

>You shouldn't learn it, because you can't do it without learning it.
wew

>assume conversion to base 10
No, it was done normally, when subtracting and borrowing from the left you wrote 10 as usual but of course it now meant the value 7
etc.

In Norway we still do as far as I'm aware.

I went to a private school. in 6th grade algebra class, they made us learn how to do base 5 arithmetic

yes.. base 5

We use base 10. It's worth teaching kids the idea of different bases, maybe have them do a few calculations, but this shouldn't take up more than one or two class periods.

>ever using coordinates at all

Reeeeee

you could count base 12 on one hand, cause you've got 3 segments on all 4 fingers (excl. thumb)

Duodecimal will never become the standard base.

They only remotely helpful system is the binary system and even this is only useful for computer scientists.
Also here in Germany, we learn the binary and hexadecimal system in fifth grade.

WHY are we using number system in reverse order? FUCK! this is what really FUCKING pisses my off. Who was that fucking imbecile, who adopted arabic numerals without first using them in the correct order?
They were concieved to be used in a way that the smallest magnitudes come before greater ones. But no, some fucklord decided to be FUCKING RETARDED and said "fuck that shit, i am gonna use them in an opposite way, cuz i am a fucking kokot"
And now, we have to face retarded arguments about endianity, why is arithmetic in reverse, why the fucking hell we need to right-align numbers when we read from left to the right, why are dates written (in sane countries) in a way, that smallest units precede the greater ones, when numbers are written in an opposite way.
Oh fucking lord, someone should hang from this. It pisses me off so hard, that I can't even.
Why the fuck would they be so fucking retarded?
please, we need to adopt the logical way of numbers. thousand should be written as 0001. it's the only sane way.
Please, do something about this. Spread the word.
FUCKING HELL I don't want to live in a world that is literally in a reverse direction. oh my...

Tom Lehrer has a PhD and was a professor in Mathematics, teaching at MIT and Harvard. To be honest, I'm surprised he doesn't get that mathematics education needed reform, but I find that there's a subset of people who think because it works for them and they got a PhD in math, it must be fine. Never mind that society would be helped if people understood math better.

Funny thing is that the process he describes is how I learned subtraction and it became the orthodoxy in education, and now people are complaining once again about changes to make kids understand numbers even more intuitively and avoid rote memorization of algorithms.

I should mention, it's how I learned it, minus the base conversion. But it made learning base conversion on my own extremely intuitive because of the whole "borrowing tens" concept helping me realize place values better.

When I was a wee lad decades ago we were all taught base 5 and later base 8 in grade school. Now I'm old and decroded. But we beat those commies to the moon.

when will you ever have to count in binary for things other than developing programs?

you've got it backwards, retard

there's no reason for anything other than an enthusiast to "learn" bases other than two and ten because they are almost always useless

you don't pay your taxes in hexadecimal
you don't order cheeseburgers in ternary
why the fuck would you require teachers to teach this

you teach a student what base ten is and how to convert from base ten to all the other bases with an algorithm and you leave it at that
modern humans think in base ten, don't get it twisted

Utilitarian pls go

I was taught to learn to count in roman numerals.

>the concept of bases should be taught

I was taught the concept of bases in a poor ghetto Californian public school, so most likely they are generally taught in most of America.

We didn't belabor the point however, because what fucking relevance does it have in a general math class besides it's existence?

Actually, we were taught to do basic arithmetic like adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing in binary, hex and octal during our CS class

>utilitarianism
>posting on Veeky Forums

engineerfag brainlet pls go