Maths is vital for young people. Without maths students lose out educationally and, later, professionally.
If we didn’t believe this fervently, we wouldn’t have embarked on producing Maths-Whizz in the first place. As it turns out, lots of parents and teachers (and even students!)Â agree with us. It now seems the UK independent think-tank Reform is equally enthusiastic about learning maths, but they have come at it from a different angle.
To quote from the much-publicised Reform report The Value of Mathematics (pdf)
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The UK’s maths economy which powers the financial services sector and wider industry is in danger of atrophy as fewer students study mathematics and attainment falls… Scores of less than 20 per cent on the top [GCSE] paper regularly suffice to gain a grade C, despite a much reduced level of difficulty. Many students are turned off by the narrow teaching which results, and this has led to a generation of “lost mathematicians”. Individuals lacking mathematical skills stand to lose £136,000 in income over a lifetime, and so have cost an estimated £9 billion to the UK economy since 1990.
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The last line is the kicker. For anyone who naively believes that higher education exists in some kind of parallel universe from the economy this finding should serve as a reminder to the contrary. It is, frankly, tiresome hearing about entrepreneurs and business leaders who claim they got where they are not in spite of lack of qualifications, but because of them. Such people believe knowledge and academic success is for the boffins, moneymaking for the businessmen, and it’s claptrap.
The Reform report puts the loss of skilled British mathematicians down to “…the diminution of the O-level/GCSE, which has gone from a key “staging post” to a “tick-box test”.” and the “narrow teaching” which comes from this, blaming a lack of emphasis on abstract thought and problem solving, and a drop in difficulty.
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The Gordian knot of political control has been tightened in an attempt to reverse the misguided trend towards “progressive” teaching. The unintended consequences of politicisation and centralisation of the subject are demotivation of teachers, a diminution of the enjoyment in mathematics by pupils and an exclusion of universities and employers from education policy. Steps to increase accountability taken by the Government and a focus on examination results have created unhelpful pressures on institutions and exam boards, which have in turn led to declining examination standards.
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The target of Reform’s report is the government, but one can also assume this shift in testing and teaching has reinforced the wider idea that maths is more about learning skills and methods than it is about rigorous thought and creativity. If maths is just a skill, then so is entering numbers on a calculator – so why bother understanding long division or the reason why the internal angles of a triangle add up to 180 degrees? As the report says: “The global maths economy is driven by high personal capability, initiative and logical thought.”
(anecdote: I once spent a rather frustrating quarter of an hour on the phone with an accountant parent who claimed her son didn’t need to learn long division, because the electronic calculator made the skill redundant. I hope she isn’t counting on her child taking maths at A-level or, indeed, becoming an accountant.)
The Reform report summary points to those ‘Masters of the Universe’ – top maths graduates who are the brains behind the city and the acme of the maths skills developed at and beyond GCSE. (Personally, I would rather those brains are put to better use than devising ‘collateralized debt obligations’ and other such wizardry behind the sub-prime crisis, but if the only place that values good maths skills is the city, that is where such rare minds will go.)
Returning to the better earnings of skilled mathematicians, we might assume that an investment in Maths-Whizz of a couple of hundred pounds over a year could be the stimulus for a child to take maths beyond GCSE and on to A-level or university and, thence, to a lifetime of higher earnings. Investments with that rate of return are few and far between, never mind the fact that learning and knowledge are good for their own sakes.
As The Reform report introduction closing paragraph says: “Radical measures have to be taken to move mathematics from “geek to chic”", something we noted here, two weeks ago. But we can leave the final word to an astute ten year-old Maths-Whizzer who, in our kids’ survey, said why she believed it was not good to be bad at maths:
You would not get a very good job if you were bad at maths
‘Nuff said.
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