Calculus serves scientists well, and I am not advocating that we junk it in high school entirely, but Dr. Arthur Benjamin, a mathemetician, makes a succinct and compelling argument here for making statistics, not calculus, the pinnacle of high school math.
(If I were the Czar of Mathematics, I'd ban calculators before senior year in high school, replace digital clocks with their analog, more useful, parents, and make counting to 10,000, one second at a time, mandatory before finishing elementary school.
I might even make counting to 100,000 be a requirement for high school graduation. Every year I offer an A+ to any student that counts aloud to 1 billion, 1 second at a time, and every year a few try it.)
