Charles
Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia
[permission to
reproduced granted if authorship is acknowledged]
When I was in grade eight, I enrolled in Latin I “because,”
my mother said, “you can’t get into university without Latin.” This view was corroborated
by the school guidance counsellor and the parents of all my friends. Going to
university was not a matter of discussion as far as my parents were concerned.
I was not Ovid’s most avid fan or of Caesar for that matter.
In fact, most of my adolescent concentration (which in retrospect strikes me as
a contradiction in terms) was on Friday night. Long term planning extended to
Saturday night. From my perspective, university was as distant a prospect as
landing on Mars and about as likely.
So, the following summer I found myself enrolled in Latin I
again, and not for the love of the language. This linguistic purgatory was
necessitated by the requirement that I have two years of Latin to qualify for
university. I had no idea that when my mother referred to having to take Latin
for admission to university it was an indeterminate sentence. Or at least it
appeared that way from the vantage point of a 14-year-old. Prayer works, apparently,
because I eventually passed Latin II.
Latin is no longer required for admission to university. Its
place was usurped by mathematics much like the invasion of Rome by the
barbarians. In other words, mathematics has become the arbiter of those worthy
of attending university. In British Columbia, for example, a student seeking
undergraduate admissions to Arts is required to have taken Pre-Calculus 11 or
Foundations of Mathematics 12.
Increasingly, however, mathematics’ vaunted status and
utility are being questioned. Among those dubious about mathematics is G.V.
Ramanathan, a professor emeritus of . . .wait for it . . . mathematics, statistics,
and computer science at the University of Illinois (Chicago). To say Ramanathan
is questioning mathematics is a bit of an understatement. He compares the
marketing of mathematics to “the marketing of creams to whiten teeth, gels to
grow hair and regimens to build a beautiful body.”
In an opinion piece in the Washington
Post, Ramanathan asks, “How much math do we really need?” He says we should
be asking ourselves that question and the next ten people we encounter – such
as “your plumber, your lawyer, your grocer, your mechanic, your physician or
even a math teacher.” Ouch!
Ramanathan is just one of the increasing number of academics
asking us to think about how much math we really need and, by extension, how
much emphasis should be placed on mathematics in school. Andrew Hacker, a
professor of political science at Queens College (City University of New York),
was interviewed by a New York Times journalist for a 2016 titled “Who
Needs Advanced Math? Not Everybody.”
Hacker comes at the issue from a slightly different
direction than Ramanathan. He said:
At the very time we should be honing and sharpening quantitative reasoning skills we punch students into algebra, geometry, calculus. The Math People take over and ignore much simpler needs. Arithmetic is super essential — we quantify everything.
Notice that he distinguishes between quantitative reasoning and
the topics typically addressed in school - algebra, geometry, calculus. Hacker
is not advocating teaching quantitative reasoning as a means of improving
critical thinking, but because everything is quantified. Besides, as Ramanathan
points out, the claim that courses such as “quantitative reasoning” improve
critical thinking is unsubstantiated.
Hacker’s piece in the Times is a teaser for his entertaining
book The
Math Myth: And Other STEM Delusions. Hacker and mathematician at large of
the Mathematical Association of America, James Tanton, debated one another at
the [US] National Museum of Mathematics before an audience of mathematicians,
an account of which was reported in the New
Yorker.
During his presentation Tanton confessed, “I have never used
the quadratic formula in my personal life. I don’t think I have ever used it in
my research life. But learning the formula wasn’t the point. It was the story
of quadratics. And, from that story, I know I can nut my way from most any
problem to do with that subject.” He seemed to be making Hacker’s point:
Every other subject is about something. Poetry is about something. Even most modern art is about something. Math is about nothing. It sounds like ‘Seinfeld.’ Math describes much of the world but is all about itself, and it has the most fantastic conundrums. But it is not about the world.
Time in school is limited. There is much more of value to be
learned than can be accommodated in that limited time. Ramanathan, Hacker, and
others ask us to consider how much of that time should be devoted to
mathematics. Is mathematics the new Latin?