My point is to agree with Arthur Benjamin that we now live in a world where there is a mass of available data. We are bombarded with statistics all the time.

More importantly the ability to read data and use data has become an essential part of everybody’s lives.

This all seems to me to point to the fact that we must teach data collection, presentation and most importantly interpretation to children as a key part of their mathematical education. Data is about real world problems and that is the things that we should be presenting to our children if they are to make sense of their ever changing digital world.