The Social Importance Of Maths

As someone with no mathematical aptitude, a couple of points immediately spring to my mind about Sir Simon Jenkins's cry against mathematics and its study, which appears in today's 'Guardian'.

The first is that we are told that mass immigration requires to continue because we have a skills shortage. It is likely to be the case that many of those allegedly missing skills are in areas such as physics and computing, where a solid grounding in maths is essential. If fewer students are immersing themselves in maths, it is logically correct to say that the country's indigenous population will have insufficient mathematical skills to enable the country to function without immigration. Historically, Sir Simon doesn't seem to do immigration - but the rest of us do, and it would seem that the teaching of maths thus becomes a social as well as educational issue.

Secondly, one can only weep for just how many people have been tossed on the scrapheap by the British educational system because they have been forced to study subjects for which they have no aptitude. I'm sorry if this sounds terribly Prussian, but if a child is good at maths they should study maths, not history - if they're good at history they should study history, not maths. The United Kingdom must contain hundreds of thousands of citizens labelled as underachievers because when they were teenage square pegs, it was thought necessary to try to batter them into the round hole of educational universalism. You tend to get more out of people when you let them do what they're good at - that's one of the reasons Tiger Woods doesn't play professional basketball, and why Henrik Larsson isn't a goalkeeper. If that principle holds good for sporting aptitude, there is absolutely no reason why it shouldn't hold good for educational aptitude as well.