  The last half-dozen years have seen The American Statistician publish
well-argued and provocative calls to change our thinking about statistics and
how we teach it, among them Brown and Kass (2009), Nolan and Temple-Lang
(2010), and Legler et al. (2010). Within this past year, the ASA has issued a
new and comprehensive set of guidelines for undergraduate programs (ASA 2014).
Accepting (and applauding) all this as background, the current article argues
the need to rethink our curriculum from the ground up, and offers five
principles and two caveats intended to help us along the path toward a new
synthesis. These principles and caveats rest on my sense of three parallel
evolutions: the convergence of trends in the roles of mathematics, computation,
and context within statistics education. These ongoing changes, together with
the articles cited above and the seminal provocation by Leo Breiman (2001) call
for a deep rethinking of what we teach to undergraduates. In particular,
following Brown and Kass, we should put priority on two goals, to make
fundamental concepts accessible and to minimize prerequisites to research.
