Assuming that you like math... would you have preferred to have more lessons focused on the lives of mathematicians? As opposed to only having lessons about mathematics itself.
I found this question on StackExchange, and I was horrified: I loved math, but I hated history, and this sounds like a suggestion to make math more like history.
The problem with school is that it not only tells you things, but it also expects you to memorize them. My memory sucks. I was good at math because I was able to re-derive everything that I forgot. But there is no way to re-derive historical trivia. If my math tests asked me questions such as "which century did Euler live in? in which country? did he have a pet, and what was the pet's name?", it would have ruined my favorite subject.
But apparently most people feel the other way round, so my answer was downvoted.
Some teachers argue that many students prefer stories about mathematicians. But I suspect that it's simply because many of those students hate math, and talking about mathematicians gives them an opportunity to discuss something other than math, which of course they are happy about. I would have been equally happy if a history teacher stopped teaching history, and instead gave us problems like "if the war started in a year X, and ended in a year Y, how many years did the war take?". But that's simply because I hated history and loved math. So obviously, people who hate math and love history would prefer to learn about the history of mathematics instead of mathematics itself. And they would probably prefer to learn about history of something else even more.
I don't mind listening to a good story about mathematicians, in my free time. But I feel like introducing history of mathematics to math lessons at school would be just another step towards dumbification of math education. That it would give people illusion of learning math without actually learning math. Yes, this is a zero-sum perspective, but at school there is a limited amount of time, and you have to split it among the subjects, and among the topics within the subject, so more history of math will inevitably mean less numbers and equations.
I had some lessons on psychology and philosophy, and was extremely disappointed. (Not sure how much of that is general, and how much I just chose a bad school.)
At psychology, most lessons were a combination of learning some things the famous psychologists said, and learning some historical trivia about them. The part that was missing completely was applying any of that knowledge, whether to real or fictional examples.
As an example, when we learned about Freud, we were given a list of ego-defense mechanisms to memorize. What I would naturally expect next, w... (read more)