Today’s Guardian has a classic piece of click-bait by the opinionated and ignorant AIDS-denialist Simon Jenkins, in which he claims that maths is a waste of time for school students, and government obssession with maths will make schools intolerable and authoritarian. His article is leavened in equal measure with sneering at any politician who tries to find a solution to any problem, haughty dismissal of any attempt to regularize or monitor teaching practice, and a sly dose of cheap stereotyping to boot. At time of writing it is completely buried on the Guardian website (at least this newspaper has some shame!) and has attracted 1594 comments, mostly disagreeing with his pathetic and stupid thesis.
The thing that really stands out for me is not the vacuity and shallowness of the arguments, but the existence of the article itself. Can anyone imagine a Japanese, Chinese or Korean newspaper bothering to publish an opinion piece arguing that maths is a waste of time? Can anyone imagine an ordinary Japanese, Chinese or Korean citizen being one-eyed enough (or worked up enough) to comment on such an article agreeing with it? The existence of such theories in East Asia is pretty questionable, I would say: there are lots of Japanese for whom maths is a waste of time, but the number of Japanese who think teaching maths is a waste of time would be pretty small, I think – certainly not sufficient to support an article on the topic in a major newspaper. If anyone wants to look at why Britain is failing in the (shudder) “global race,” articles like this by “public thinkers” give you a big hint as to the answer: an ex-editor of the Times actually believes that trying to improve maths teaching is a “race to the bottom” against China, and apparently believes schools shouldn’t teach things if they are a waste of time to the majority of their pupils.
I wonder what Jenkins thinks schools should be doing, if not teaching material that is a waste of time? Shakespeare is clearly out, as is most of history. Apparently philosophy is important because it helps one to understand formal logic (just putting aside the preponderance of mathematicians amongst the classical philosophers, for the sake of “argument”…) Jenkins is an AIDS denialist, so I guess he thinks sex education is a waste of time too. I imagine he thinks geography enormously relevant, but he would probably prefer it to focus on map reading and memorizing the names of capital cities – all that stuff about social geography and global warming is irrelevant, surely. And he wouldn’t want kids being able to calculate age-standardized mortality rates, because then they might notice that AIDS is a big issue in some parts of the world …
Most of all these articles – which appear fairly regularly in the British press – make me angry because of the toxic mix of contradictory stereotypes about maths (and by extension, mathematicians) that they promulgate. On the one hand maths teaching is a brutal exercise in crushing creativity, because maths is a fundamentally joyless and mechanical process that depends on rote learning and soul-destroying repetition; but only a few people are actually good at maths – presumably due to some kind of innate talent or special powers – so there’s no point in teaching the rest of us anything. Not only are these two ideas fundamentally incompatible, but they also suggest some kind of contrast with the humanities in which studying the humanities is always and everywhere liberating and enlightening, and hours of soulless repetition (or indeed the development of any kind of skills connected to such study) are unnecessary. Tell that to a good writer, or a ballerina … Jenkins’s view somehow manages to simultaneously belittle both mathematics and the disciplines he sets up in opposition to it.
He also manages to belittle the Chinese when he says
I once visited Chinese schools; they were like communist drill halls, factories of pressure, discipline and childhood misery
What’s that, Jenkins? You visited “Chinese schools”? All of them, was it? Maybe just 10% of them? Or did you mean to say “a Chinese school” and just couldn’t quite get yourself to spit it out? A solid grounding in mathematics might help you with that whole singular/plural distinction thing, and it might also help you to calculate what proportion of “Chinese schools” you visited, to help you understand how representative your experience was. But I can tell you this for free, Jenkins: I studied in British schools (probably, at a guess, more schools than you ever visited in China), and I can tell you now: they were like communist drill halls, factories of discipline and childhood misery. There’s even a famous British song about how terrible they are. At least Chinese kids leave their schools capable of doing basic mathematics. You might want to think about that before you make sweeping statements about a nation of a billion people, based on a couple of hours in a Shanghai school.
Many of the commenters on the article have said this, but I’d like to repeat it here: if you want to see the intellectual justification for Britain’s decline in the modern world, articles like this make it as clear as day. Here we have a senior public figure who was an editor of Britain’s most respected paper (the Times), writing from the nation that invented calculus about how teaching mathematics is a waste of time. That, right there, expresses Britain’s decline in a nutshell. Thank you, Jenkins, for making it clear. Now to the back of the class with you, until you have learnt your times tables.
Compromise and Conceit 
February 21, 2014 at 1:55 am
“I imagine he thinks geography enormously relevant, but he would probably prefer it to focus on map reading and memorizing the names of capital cities – all that stuff about social geography and global warming is irrelevant, surely. “
Why do you assume that because he’s an AIDS denialist that he’s an AGW skeptic? Given he’s writing in the Guardian, absent other evidence, I’d assume that he thinks maths should be discarded for more discussion time on how important solar power is.
Not the science of how solar power works of course, because that’d require a strong maths grounding to have any meaningful study. But I’d assume it’d at least be a course on how to do creative interpretive dance on the death of the planet absent solar panels.
“haughty dismissal of any attempt to regularize or monitor teaching practice”
You know who else dismisses measuring teaching outcomes? The Australian teachers unions. [1] It’s hardly out of character for something posted in the Guardian. Frankly, it’d be more surprising to see it supported there.
[1] Who Gillard stood up to to introduce a degree of measurement.
February 21, 2014 at 8:52 pm
I don’t assume he’s a global warming skeptic because he’s an AIDS denialist, and this paragraph isn’t meant to imply that – just that he thinks its irrelevant (since it’s all sciency and stuff). He is a confirmed HIV denialist, however. And having said that, it’s no surprise that Jenkins turns out to be an obfuscator on global warming, willing to believe the stupid lies of the denialists and trotting out every half-arsed maths-free lie they can come up with. Maybe a decent maths education would have helped in this regard?
I can’t imagine Jenkins being particularly supportive of creative dance either, let alone on solar panels. He clearly doesn’t approve of renewable energy sources, and likes to take the kind of hard-arsed rationalist approach that would dismiss modern dance out of hand. But in the end, he’s trading on an old denialist canard – that uncertainty is too great to make decisions about risk. He doesn’t just apply this do-nothing nihilist approach to HIV and AGW – he was dismissive of all efforts to combat flu pandemics, and is also dismissive of smoking bans and any other health-related interventions. He clearly doesn’t understand the concept of risk.
That an HIV denialist idiot like this remains accepted in the journalistic community tells you all you need to know about the quality of “thought” amongst modern journalists. This man was a leading tout of the crap ideas that influenced HIV policy in South Africa with disastrous results. Yet he remains a respected columnist in major British newspapers. What does that tell you?
re: measuring teaching outcomes, the guy Spiegelhalter who Jenkins quotes is a major statistician in this field, and his research tends to be quite critical of many efforts to measure teaching outcomes. I’m all for it, but I think the methods in place are generally weak (this issue has also been pointed out with respect ot assessment of hospital mortality), and it’s possible that the Australian rankings are entirely fictitious, in that the variance of estimated rankings is so great that there is actually no difference between the top and bottom schools. In principle I like the idea of these rankings, but in practice I think they’re statistically weak. So in the battle between Gillard and the teacher’s unions, I think they were both right (but in the end, as I understand it, Gillard won).
February 22, 2014 at 9:41 am
“What does that tell you?”
The Guardian’s opinion page is even less connected to reality than I’d assumed?
“I’m all for it, but I think the methods in place are generally weak (this issue has also been pointed out with respect ot assessment of hospital mortality), and it’s possible that the Australian rankings are entirely fictitious”
My experience with Key Performance Indicators in the workplace is they strongly tend to be badly designed. That doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea, just that you need to really care and work on them [1]. I’d expect the school results to be similar (until heaps more work is put into them over years and a baseline set of data builds up).
It’s still worth doing it though. Just not worth assuming that they should be taken as gospel right now.
[1] It’s possible that designing such things well may actually be a field of study that requires a strong grasp of maths and years of consideration on measurements…
February 25, 2014 at 10:29 am
The Guardian’s opinion page is even less connected to reality
Isn’t this the purpose of an opinion page? Incidentally, I really hate the slogan at the top of the opinion page: “Comment is free … but facts are sacred.” First of all, the Guardian opinion page doesn’t behave very much in line with this slogan, and secondly the slogan is really crappy. If it said “Comment is free … but facts are priceless” or something similar it would be following a pattern of juxtaposition that would be good English, but juxtaposing the holy with the (financially) free is just dumb. And selecting a dumb quote from a past editor is so inward-looking and stale … maybe that’s why they’re willing to publish work on risk analysis by an HIV denialist …
In health services research the quest for good methods of measuring hospital performance is ongoing, and I think beginning to have some success. But in this field the search is not for a way of ranking hospitals so much as finding outliers and preventing excess deaths. In schools it’s more complicated and requires much more finesse, because it’s supposed to distinguish between schools. Years ago at a presentation these methods it was shown that the variance of estimates is so high that you can barely distinguish between the schools at the very top and the very bottom, so the ones in between are essentially indistinguishable. I doubt things have changed much since. Adjusting these measures for school-specific and also for family-specific effects is also extremely difficult, plus of course the best measure of school performance would incorporate measures of the school’s success on the same students over time – otherwise it penalizes schools that take in poor students and produce mediocre ones, vs. schools that can select good students and produce good students. But adjusting for all these things puts you right at the edge of modern statistical knowledge, and is unlikely to be done well (yet). Incidentally, as I understand it NAPLAN does not compare performance over time, only performance across schools. This means that it can only adjust for the quality of the students on a cross-sectional basis, and so would surely punish over-performing schools from poor areas (see my previous sentence re: longitudinal vs. cross-sectional outcomes). I don’t know if they plan to change this as the time period of the data increases, but if they don’t then I suspect the NAPLAN indicators will continue to punish such schools. Also I note that this kind of measurement system is unable to overcome the variance in the data in England, which has more than twice as many students as Australia. So the chances of getting better-than-random-error outcomes in Australia are possibly quite low.
That doesn’t mean it’s not worth trying, but the teacher’s union’s concerns – that it will fail to properly control for the background and talents of the students and end up rating schools according to the academic and wealth context of the students’ families rather than the actual performance of the schools – is a valid one. I suspect these problems will be ironed out in time, but never to everyone’s full satisfaction.