Photo: A math class in Fall River, Massachusetts, 1916. (Lewis Hine/Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division).
Journalist Travis Meier wrote an op-ed article for The Washington Post last week.
The trouble with schools is too much math.
I was overjoyed to find at least one red-blooded American who agrees with me… that the main problem with American education is ‘math’.
Too much of it.
Mr. Miller wrote:
I know only two people who can readily recite the quadratic formula. My wife is one. She’s always been a whiz at school, but, as a choir teacher, she has absolutely no use for the equation (other than as an occasional party trick). The other person is my brother, who works with electron-beam technology as a mechanical engineer. He’s in the minority of people who actually use advanced math daily.
When he mentions the “minority” who actually use quadratic equations daily, he is referring to a very small minority.
I’m a proud member part of the Silent Majority who use math as little as possible, even when it’s called for. When did I last balance my checkbook? Possibly 2005. And that’s not even advanced math.
(I picked 2005, because that’s the year my pocket calculator died, and I have yet to replace it.)
Some Daily Post columnists have offered various other complaints about American public education, like banned books, or ‘woke’ social studies courses. If only the problem were so simple!
According to Mr. Miller, only 22 percent of the nation’s workers use any math more advanced than fractions, and those workers typically occupy technical or skilled positions. So like, they probably don’t work in Pagosa Springs. That means more than three-fourths of the American population spends painful years in school futzing around with numbers when they could be learning something useful. How to change the oil, for example.
How many Americans learned how to change the oil in their car, during 13 years of public schooling? Less than 22 percent, I bet. Most of us don’t even know what the oil is for. (Me, for example.)
Or how to replace your furnace filter. Like, really important stuff. (How many of us have replaced our furnace filter in the past two years?)
Instead, they spend years teaching us math that most of us will never use.
They could have taught us logic, instead.
Logic is what I try to use when writing my columns here in the Daily Post. I think we all appreciate logic, on some level. Tracing a statement or claim back to its underlying premises… testing each link in a chain of thought for unsupported assumptions. Assumptions are bad enough. But the unsupported kind — they are the worst.
People trained in logic are better able to spot the deceptions and misdirection that politicians sometimes employ. And I’m being nice, when I say “sometimes”. I could have said, “all the time” and I would still be logically correct.
From Mr. Miller:
It’s reasonable to suggest that public schools all provide a standardized core curriculum. But what makes up a fundamental education? America has not thought through this question in a national conversation since the 1983 release of “A Nation At Risk.” The product of a presidential commission on education, this report warned of declining achievement in the country’s schools and diagnosed “the urgent need for improvement.”
Among its recommendations were a minimum of three years of math for all high school graduates.
Since that time, the digital revolution has placed massive computational power in the palm of every student’s hand. Should the need for a cube root arise in someone’ life, Siri is available 24/7 to provide the answer.
That right there is a fine example of logic, at work.
Okay, yes, he did include a couple of numbers. “Three years of math.” “Siri is available 24/7”. And also, “1983”.
I think we can excuse Mr. Miller for falling back on math, now and then, after 13 years of public school brainwashing. Luckily, most Americans have foreotten almost all the math they learned in school.
America’s Founders knew it would take educated citizens for this democratic republic to succeed.
But nowhere did they mention the quadratic formula.