content: For purely theoretical math, sure. There isn't a need to have a calculator while learning basic algebra or doing symbolic manipulations.  It would however make for a boring class. Real world number are rarely even approximately perfect squares, or have integer trigonometry terms. Real world examples are tedious to do by hand. An object thrown in the air take 3.5 seconds before return to the same height, how far did it go up? It's a more interesting question that "what is x". Unfortunately the interesting answer is  approximately 15.016432812 meters... which I did with a calculator.