Simon Jenkins: Our fixation with maths doesn’t add up
There is nothing, except religion, as conservative as a school curriculum. It is drenched in archaic prejudice and vested interest.
When the medieval church banned geography as an offence against the Bible, what had been the queen of the sciences never recovered. Instead Latin dominated the “grammar” curriculum into the 20th century, to the expense of all science.
Today maths is the new Latin.
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Tim Gowers: Maths isn’t the problem – the way it’s taught is
Mathematics should be a tool for increasing one’s thinking power but for many children it is just a set of rather pointless rules for manipulating symbols.
The problem becomes clear if one asks children a question such as the following: a number 35 bus pulls up at a bus stop and eight passengers get on; what is the age of the bus driver?
A large percentage of children, their minds numbed by years of symbol manipulation, will give the answer 43.
This is a tragedy: rather than being trained to think, these children have been trained to do the opposite.
»»» Läs vidare [The Guardian]