13 ms·

Does mathematics have a place in higher education?

70 points by cottonseed 14y ago

photon137 14y ago
Yes.
pliny 14y ago
No.
jayferd 14y ago
Nobody seems to understand what college-level math is. This isn't balancing checkbooks, folks. I loved being a math major, and I have trouble doing simple math. College-level mathematics is about as far removed from the "real world" as you can get. We convince ourselves that this learning is valuable because those who have certificates saying they've learned it get better-paying jobs -- because we've convinced ourselves that it's valuable. Don't get me wrong - math is awesome, and everyone, especially young people, should have the opportunity to explore it. Perhaps it's helpful to think of math as a cultural activity, which is mostly removed from practical concerns.
- photon137 14y ago
  Your are confusing Math versus Applied Math. We take what we want to use in the study of engineering, physics, economics, finance and political science - pure Math develops those tools and they're highly useful. Is Math of a college level necessary for everyone? Certainly not. Should algebra be necessary for everyone - I think so (I think the same way about calculus). Nothing is necessary to perform your day-to-day duties - not even arithmetic - people have been getting by and been leading fruitful lives for thousands of years without that sort of stuff. So when people talk about learning Math as a life-skill they're dead wrong. But if you want to anything more that just get by - if you want to ask questions and support your arguments, analyze problems and come up with answers you can trust you gotta, oughta, shoulda learn Math.
- eshvk 14y ago
  I don't think she is talking about Math majors. She is talking about some requirements that other majors have to complete as part of finishing up their degree. Having said that, I know people in say computer science who struggled through Calculus not really caring for the subject. I can't imagine how things were for people in less technical disciplines. While Calculus is certainly important for CS majors (well probably about as much as say randomized algorithms), I can't help but ask why these classes are not replaced by a class in first order logic, especially if the end goal is to train people to think mathematically.
  - _delirium 14y ago
    I agree that formal logic is probably a more relevant math-y course than calculus for the average CS student. But how to design these requirements is a longstanding problem, partly due to disagreements over what should be in a "technical core", and partly due to staffing and issues of uniformity. Calculus is probably more relevant than symbolic logic for many kinds of engineering, for example, so the course is already being offered. It's also seen by (most) mathematicians as a more central subject, so it's what goes in the core if the mathematics department is given responsibility for designing the core. Additional complications arise over what to do with things like statistics (in some places it's in the math department, while in others it's a separate department).
    - eshvk 14y ago
      Oh, I am not disagreeing with the importance of Calculus for engineering. However, calculus as a core tool for say biology majors? While, I know that there are a ton of biological models (say in population dynamics) that require knowledge of calculus, I feel like for most people, this becomes one of those hate it and get through it classes and we really need to rethink its importance.
      - _delirium 14y ago
        No disagreement there, and especially the way it's normally taught now, which can feel more like a course on special-case methods for performing symbolic integration. There is some understanding you gain by knowing how to work symbolic integrals (the chain rule, integration by parts, etc., etc.), but I wouldn't put it near the top of the list of things all students must know. The actual integration can be done fine by Mathematica or Maple; what's important is what you do with that.
colanderman 14y ago
She makes a good point about algebra students not understanding prerequisites. I worked for two years at a high school where students were having trouble with algebra. Almost invariably this was due to (a) an abysmal grasp of arithmetic; many students couldn't divide or even subtract reliably, leading to insurmountable frustation, and (b) the hand-wavy means by which algebra, and especially its archaic conventions (such as order of operations and elision of the times symbol) were taught. I once solved these problems for a small group of these children to whom I taught algebra from first principles: all grammar was explicit (no elision of parentheses or operators) and we used no numerals. The reduction rules then were able to fit down one side of a whiteboard, and after five one-hour sessions, self-professed math phobes were solving nontrivial equations.
- pacala 14y ago
  +1 on explicit grammar. In my recollection, that was the biggest source of frustration in studying math subjects: decoding the actual meaning of a math text fragment and separating random elisions from errors.
- podperson 14y ago
  It's funny how in grade school the multiplication symbol is omitted, only to be (more confusingly replaced) by a period later on when the expressions get complicated. I suspect it's the lack of arithmetic skill more than the conventions that are the heart of the problem. I think kids should be required to learn to do mental arithmetic before they're allowed to use calculators, but this may be impractical.
  - sanxiyn 14y ago
    Why is it impractical? (It's the way we do it in South Korea.)
    - podperson 14y ago
      In the United States denying children access to things seems to be quite impractical :-) I also worry that smart kids will work out that calculators are ubiquitous before they force themselves to become proficient at mental arithmetic (e.g. Google and Spotlight are both far more powerful calculators than anything I had access to as a student).
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
ekm2 14y ago
So...why shouldnt we phase out Poetry too?Is there a definitive study showing that training in poetry makes for more competent assembly line workers and lower unemployment levels?
- sanxiyn 14y ago
  We probably should.
- streptomycin 14y ago
  If there is anywhere where some poetry class is a requirement for graduation for all majors, that requirement probably should be phased out.
- peschkaj 14y ago
  I think we should commission such a study. Those of us with English degrees will be perfectly suited to conducting this survey and delivering the results in epic poem format.
ef4 14y ago
"School mathematics" is something almost completely different from mathematics. (For an elaboration on this idea, see http://duckduckgo.com/?q=lockharts+lament http://duckduckgo.com/?q=lockharts+lament). Meanwhile, being good at (actual) math is rapidly become a prerequisite for having a bright economic future. School math is worth increasingly little (computers do it better than you). Whereas true math is deeply creative, and computers suck at it. This separation is also why so many programmers say "programming doesn't take math". It doesn't take school math. It rests deeply on true mathematical reasoning.
- guscost 14y ago
  Math became ludicrously easy for me as soon as I realized how to think about it. It wasn't the same method that they were suggesting in school, and I don't know that my method would work for everyone.
  - ThomPete 14y ago
    As someone who still haven't found a way to think about it I would be curious what you ended up with.
  - drieddust 14y ago
    I will be very much interested in learning what method did you use.After dropping from regular education 12 years ago, I have tried to learn mathematics multiple times with moderate success only. Please try to share your methods via a blog post/elaborate comment if you can spare some time.
    - guscost 14y ago
      All I can finish today is a rather unhelpful rant. I'm very opinionated and angry about this stuff: http://guscost.com/2012/07/29/mathemantics/ http://guscost.com/2012/07/29/mathemantics/ But I'll be sure to put together a follow-up instructional blog that skips the vitriol, as nobody should actually have to just believe me. I do think that the very general attitude toward each problem is the only constant feature, and each topic has to be treated as a brand-new exploration, so I'll need to coagulate a topic to start off with. I'm leaning towards degrees of freedom, coordinate systems and the magic of Euler's formula. Sound good? And if not, I'm serious about the last sentence. What topic gave you the most trouble when you tried to learn it?
jopt 14y ago
Is this problem unique to mathematics? Consider natural sciences, history, geography. It's easy to make up real-world examples of when each could be an advantage, but it's hard to say anything is necessary. It is what you make it.
- sanxiyn 14y ago
  The article is not really talking about mathematics. It is talking about numeracy, which is on par with literacy in importance in my opinion.
doc4t 14y ago
What a marvelous stupid idea. Math and Applied Math is more than numbers and math for the sake of math. It is a way to bring your level of abstract thinking higher - much the same way learning languages does. Math is so much more than algebra and calculus. It will teach you pattern recognition and deduction - two highly sought after skills in engineering - but can be applied to any profession. If anything I believe we should bump up the level of math that high school children learn.
- sanxiyn 14y ago
  You seem to imply that actual mathematical content is rather less important. Then why stick with algebra and calculus? Frankly, I agree with Hacker: quadratic equations are boring. Teaching number theory will do better job of teaching pattern recognition and deduction. More Fermat's little theorem, more Chinese remainder theorem, less quadratic equations. I found undergraduate number theory to be far easier and more fun than calculus, and you need no calculus to start on number theory.
  - doc4t 14y ago
    > You seem to imply that actual mathematical content is rather less important No. The point was that it is much more than what you call the content.
podperson 14y ago
Well, it's not an example of Betteridge's law ;-) The political science professor in question might consider the fact that while many college students struggle with basic math, they struggle just as much with basic literacy (most undergraduates can't write grammatical sentences, use punctuation, don't know how to write an essay, and have a hazy grasp of the idea of citation). Extending his argument we might consider removing History and English from the curriculum.
sharms 14y ago
I would say that the basic college level math courses have helped me tremendously in non-obvious ways. Companies run on spreadsheets and formulas, and to better predict and analyze situations, it is easier if all parties involved have a common understanding. Our economies are huge, number driven in almost every aspect. To ignore that or turn out graduates are less well rounded would not be more productive as a whole.
PaulHoule 14y ago
people say they want science and math skills but do they really? when i was a 10 yr old kid in 1982 i wanted to create email and newsgroup type systems and my computer science teacher was like that's a big waste of time like video games, get thinking about data structures and algorithms instead 10 years later I'm in college and the guy who runs the computer center got a source code license for SunOS and fubar-ed our whole system because he wanted to block our access to the internet, which would stop our academic pursuits. hell we were just trying to be matt zuckerberg a decade before his time. or there's this guy who was the one bright kid who remembered what he learned in organic chemistry class. all the other muggles sold their textbooks and forgot about it, but he applied what he learned to invent a way to make a new drug with stuff you can buy at the grocery store. this grad school dropout got his work cited in the "journal of emergency medicine" because some kid made a batch of this vile brew and chucked all over his bed and the doc in the ER is like "what the f'uh?", "i mean you read this on the f'en internet and really did it?" And all this time this guy and his crew are worried they're going to get called to testify about this in Congress and they were just so happy when the statue of limitations came up. If students studied science and engineering and got both the ability and the will to confront technological society, we'd have a revolution.
- apl 14y ago
  A little coherence goes a long way.
  - PaulHoule 14y ago
    ...and James Joyce showed you can get lit profs to take what you write seriously without any coherence
    - gcv 14y ago
      ...only in Finnegans Wake. And let's be fair to English professors, many of them don't take that book too seriously. :)
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
impendia 14y ago
"Nobody ever brags about not knowing how to read, but people brag all the time about not knowing how to do math." This is not just math, it's virtually every subject you learned in school. Imagine the following at a cocktail party: "I had to read Joyce, Whitman, and Hawthorne, but I never got the point of any of them." "I took a lot of history, it was a bunch of dates which I could never remember." "I took three years of Spanish, but I don't remember a word." Et cetera.
- quacker 14y ago
  You're right, but he's claiming this at a lower level. I imagine it's more embarrassing to have to ask, "What does this say?" than to have to ask, "How much change should I receive?"
- excuse-me 14y ago
  Same with engineering - just read any sunday paper home section article. Somebody will be saying that they can never assemble some piece of Ikea furniture. This stuff is designed so that a 5year old could follow instructions but anyone stylish has to look like they can never use their hands. Imagine you are an engineer and faced with a McD menu it would be fashionable to point and say = I'll have that one, I can never do words and numbers.
- toomuchcoffee 14y ago
  All perfectly understandable. It's called "the path less taken." A lot of people just don't click with formalized education at all in their early years. They just couldn't throw themselves behind all those authors and facts they're "supposed to" be up on. Some of them are too busy learning informally by dealing with the world around them -- i.e. with things like nature, work, and you know, other people. Then slowly grow to form their own view of the world, and seek their own path to obtaining a more structured comprehension of it -- which might well mean starting (on their own volition) formalized education sometime in their 20s or 30s -- or perhaps not. A great many who choose this route, or have it forced upon them may fail or flounder -- but a great many also don't, and end up with accomplishments for others to read about or hear about in those books, classes and received intuition that some people think are the only valid starting points to figuring out how to make a dent in the universe.
excuse-me 14y ago
Does non-maths higher education have a place? Non-technical degrees are now worthless in the job market because everyone has one. So their purpose, showing the best/brightest candidates, is now gone - so why bother doing a non-maths based degree? If companies simply stopped demanding all those eng-lit, art-history and business degrees for every position starting in the mail room those people could all skip college, skip being $100K in debt and leave a lot of higher education funding for science, engineering and even medicine.
Tycho 14y ago
The thing about mathematical literacy and financial contracts (credit agreements etc) is that if those contracts are constructed in such a way as to deliberately confuse the average customer/borrower, then increasing the average level of education wont actually help. The contracts will just get even more confusing to compensate.
DanielBMarkham 14y ago
The future is computers, and computers work through tagged languages and symbolic systems. Everybody needs to understand formal symbolic systems. Math is the best way that I know of to do this. It used to be that to be a composer, first you learned the piano. The piano was thought to give one an appreciation of the nature and nuance of music. From there you could much more easily learn other instruments and then learn how to put them together into something beautiful. Math is the new piano. Learn symbolic manipulation -- and I'd say that means first-year calculus -- and you can work with the kinds of symbolic systems you'll find everywhere else in the modern world. I used to do some tutoring when I was a kid, and I think this level of understanding is achievable by 90% of the population given the right environment. The real question is "why are the structures and environments for education that we create so unable to accomplish this?" Dumbing down the system isn't the answer. It's not like you can dumb down the world to make up for your inability to prepare students for it.
- stdbrouw 14y ago
  > Math is the best way that I know of to do this. But is it the best way educators know of to do this? Because at the end of the day, whether math is a good basic skill that pays dividends in logical thinking and symbolic manipulation (dividends beyond what other methods could deliver) is an empirical question. What you say sounds plausible, but theories can be plausible and dead wrong.
- swordswinger12 14y ago
  That is a really pretty analogy. My compliments.
  - toomuchcoffee 14y ago
    But is also flawed, because its premise is flawed.
- gizmo686 14y ago
  Why is first year calculus the standard for symbol manipulation? Algebra is also pure symbol manipulation, and the applications of it are more universal, whereas calculus is symbol manipulation over 2 functions, plus algebra; but those two functions have a lot of conceptual baggage that is not nearly as useful.
pirateking 14y ago
My dream educational system destroys the concept of "subjects" - no more siloing knowledge within artificial boundaries. Students think things like "Algebra is Math and I hate Math so I hate Algebra" or "Math is my worst subject." It is an easy label to associate their failures with. An example of learning without boundaries: One day, I decide I want to play the guitar. I get my hands on one and fiddle around. Perhaps a brief history on the instrument will give me some better context as to why the instrument is shaped as it is, and what all the features are. An exposure to famous guitarists and their music improves my appreciation of music and gives me context to work with. As I continue to struggle with notes and basic music theory, it may be a good time to take a brief detour into the realm of physics - a lesson in simple harmonics. If interested, I can dive further into the required algebra relevant to harmonic equations. Hmm... maybe learning to use a computer program can help me figure out how messing with these waves changes the sound... And so it goes. A familiar story to most hackers, but sadly an approach that most educational systems do not encourage. Is this exploratory form of learning superior? My theory is that the associations formed between nodes of knowledge are necessary for any sort of actual deep learning to occur. By sandboxing subjects, the standard school curriculum limits the possible associations that students think are allowed, thus limiting the probability of successful links between nodes. Even an above average student can graduate from college, and be left with nothing but a bunch of barely reachable random islands of knowledge, floating further out to sea every day. In other words: school sucks, learning rules.
- alpine 14y ago
  So you aspire to be a Renaissance Man?
  - TheAmazingIdiot 14y ago
    I guess you could put it that way. I see in his description more of a tech tree. It'd be more akin to what you'd see in Diablo 2, but expanded by a 1000. The tech tree method would also explain prerequisites. Ideally, if you can prove you have the knowledge of a node, you could pass through it and continue learning. No clue how we would go from factory farmed schools to that though. It's another educational pie-in-the-sky thought.
alpine 14y ago
'...people brag all the time about not knowing how to do math'. This is true, I think, mostly of Anglo-Saxon countries. It is quite a disgusting attitude. In what way is someone's life-chances or overall happiness degraded by a better understanding or skill in the use of numbers and higher mathematical concepts? I consider this anti-maths meme one of the most pernicious aspects of our culture.
- sanxiyn 14y ago
  I think this is misunderstanding of cause and effect, and correlation does not imply causation. High math skill does correlate with nerdiness, and ceteris paribus, nerdiness does degrade your life chances or overall happiness. It does not mean high math skill alone, if you are not nerdy, will degrade your life chances, but well, they do not have high math skill to understand that. :)
  - alpine 14y ago
    I wasn't so much thinking about innate mathematical ability, more the mathematical education most kids should receive. Disparaging attitudes towards maths skills, which is a general rule, is pretty harmful to society, I think.
sanxiyn 14y ago
Go read "How should mathematics be taught to non-mathematicians?" for a mathematician's take on the topic. http://gowers.wordpress.com/2012/06/08/how-should-mathematics-be-taught-to-non-mathematicians/ http://gowers.wordpress.com/2012/06/08/how-should-mathematic...
comicjk 14y ago
> Yes, young people should learn to read and write and do long division, whether they want to or not. Ironic, since in our modern computerized world algebra is important and long division is useless. The writer himself probably carries a powerful computer in his pocket.

70 points by cottonseed 14y ago

photon137 14y ago

Yes.

pliny 14y ago

No.

jayferd 14y ago

Nobody seems to understand what college-level math is. This isn't balancing checkbooks, folks. I loved being a math major, and I have trouble doing simple math. College-level mathematics is about as far removed from the "real world" as you can get. We convince ourselves that this learning is valuable because those who have certificates saying they've learned it get better-paying jobs -- because we've convinced ourselves that it's valuable. Don't get me wrong - math is awesome, and everyone, especially young people, should have the opportunity to explore it. Perhaps it's helpful to think of math as a cultural activity, which is mostly removed from practical concerns.

photon137 14y ago
Your are confusing Math versus Applied Math. We take what we want to use in the study of engineering, physics, economics, finance and political science - pure Math develops those tools and they're highly useful. Is Math of a college level necessary for everyone? Certainly not. Should algebra be necessary for everyone - I think so (I think the same way about calculus). Nothing is necessary to perform your day-to-day duties - not even arithmetic - people have been getting by and been leading fruitful lives for thousands of years without that sort of stuff. So when people talk about learning Math as a life-skill they're dead wrong. But if you want to anything more that just get by - if you want to ask questions and support your arguments, analyze problems and come up with answers you can trust you gotta, oughta, shoulda learn Math.
eshvk 14y ago
I don't think she is talking about Math majors. She is talking about some requirements that other majors have to complete as part of finishing up their degree. Having said that, I know people in say computer science who struggled through Calculus not really caring for the subject. I can't imagine how things were for people in less technical disciplines. While Calculus is certainly important for CS majors (well probably about as much as say randomized algorithms), I can't help but ask why these classes are not replaced by a class in first order logic, especially if the end goal is to train people to think mathematically.
- _delirium 14y ago
  I agree that formal logic is probably a more relevant math-y course than calculus for the average CS student. But how to design these requirements is a longstanding problem, partly due to disagreements over what should be in a "technical core", and partly due to staffing and issues of uniformity. Calculus is probably more relevant than symbolic logic for many kinds of engineering, for example, so the course is already being offered. It's also seen by (most) mathematicians as a more central subject, so it's what goes in the core if the mathematics department is given responsibility for designing the core. Additional complications arise over what to do with things like statistics (in some places it's in the math department, while in others it's a separate department).
  - eshvk 14y ago
    Oh, I am not disagreeing with the importance of Calculus for engineering. However, calculus as a core tool for say biology majors? While, I know that there are a ton of biological models (say in population dynamics) that require knowledge of calculus, I feel like for most people, this becomes one of those hate it and get through it classes and we really need to rethink its importance.
    - _delirium 14y ago
      No disagreement there, and especially the way it's normally taught now, which can feel more like a course on special-case methods for performing symbolic integration. There is some understanding you gain by knowing how to work symbolic integrals (the chain rule, integration by parts, etc., etc.), but I wouldn't put it near the top of the list of things all students must know. The actual integration can be done fine by Mathematica or Maple; what's important is what you do with that.

colanderman 14y ago

She makes a good point about algebra students not understanding prerequisites. I worked for two years at a high school where students were having trouble with algebra. Almost invariably this was due to (a) an abysmal grasp of arithmetic; many students couldn't divide or even subtract reliably, leading to insurmountable frustation, and (b) the hand-wavy means by which algebra, and especially its archaic conventions (such as order of operations and elision of the times symbol) were taught. I once solved these problems for a small group of these children to whom I taught algebra from first principles: all grammar was explicit (no elision of parentheses or operators) and we used no numerals. The reduction rules then were able to fit down one side of a whiteboard, and after five one-hour sessions, self-professed math phobes were solving nontrivial equations.

pacala 14y ago
+1 on explicit grammar. In my recollection, that was the biggest source of frustration in studying math subjects: decoding the actual meaning of a math text fragment and separating random elisions from errors.
podperson 14y ago
It's funny how in grade school the multiplication symbol is omitted, only to be (more confusingly replaced) by a period later on when the expressions get complicated. I suspect it's the lack of arithmetic skill more than the conventions that are the heart of the problem. I think kids should be required to learn to do mental arithmetic before they're allowed to use calculators, but this may be impractical.
- sanxiyn 14y ago
  Why is it impractical? (It's the way we do it in South Korea.)
  - podperson 14y ago
    In the United States denying children access to things seems to be quite impractical :-) I also worry that smart kids will work out that calculators are ubiquitous before they force themselves to become proficient at mental arithmetic (e.g. Google and Spotlight are both far more powerful calculators than anything I had access to as a student).

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

ekm2 14y ago

So...why shouldnt we phase out Poetry too?Is there a definitive study showing that training in poetry makes for more competent assembly line workers and lower unemployment levels?

sanxiyn 14y ago
We probably should.
streptomycin 14y ago
If there is anywhere where some poetry class is a requirement for graduation for all majors, that requirement probably should be phased out.
peschkaj 14y ago
I think we should commission such a study. Those of us with English degrees will be perfectly suited to conducting this survey and delivering the results in epic poem format.

ef4 14y ago

"School mathematics" is something almost completely different from mathematics. (For an elaboration on this idea, see http://duckduckgo.com/?q=lockharts+lament http://duckduckgo.com/?q=lockharts+lament). Meanwhile, being good at (actual) math is rapidly become a prerequisite for having a bright economic future. School math is worth increasingly little (computers do it better than you). Whereas true math is deeply creative, and computers suck at it. This separation is also why so many programmers say "programming doesn't take math". It doesn't take school math. It rests deeply on true mathematical reasoning.

guscost 14y ago
Math became ludicrously easy for me as soon as I realized how to think about it. It wasn't the same method that they were suggesting in school, and I don't know that my method would work for everyone.
- ThomPete 14y ago
  As someone who still haven't found a way to think about it I would be curious what you ended up with.
- drieddust 14y ago
  I will be very much interested in learning what method did you use.After dropping from regular education 12 years ago, I have tried to learn mathematics multiple times with moderate success only. Please try to share your methods via a blog post/elaborate comment if you can spare some time.
  - guscost 14y ago
    All I can finish today is a rather unhelpful rant. I'm very opinionated and angry about this stuff: http://guscost.com/2012/07/29/mathemantics/ http://guscost.com/2012/07/29/mathemantics/ But I'll be sure to put together a follow-up instructional blog that skips the vitriol, as nobody should actually have to just believe me. I do think that the very general attitude toward each problem is the only constant feature, and each topic has to be treated as a brand-new exploration, so I'll need to coagulate a topic to start off with. I'm leaning towards degrees of freedom, coordinate systems and the magic of Euler's formula. Sound good? And if not, I'm serious about the last sentence. What topic gave you the most trouble when you tried to learn it?

jopt 14y ago

Is this problem unique to mathematics? Consider natural sciences, history, geography. It's easy to make up real-world examples of when each could be an advantage, but it's hard to say anything is necessary. It is what you make it.

sanxiyn 14y ago
The article is not really talking about mathematics. It is talking about numeracy, which is on par with literacy in importance in my opinion.

doc4t 14y ago

What a marvelous stupid idea. Math and Applied Math is more than numbers and math for the sake of math. It is a way to bring your level of abstract thinking higher - much the same way learning languages does. Math is so much more than algebra and calculus. It will teach you pattern recognition and deduction - two highly sought after skills in engineering - but can be applied to any profession. If anything I believe we should bump up the level of math that high school children learn.

sanxiyn 14y ago
You seem to imply that actual mathematical content is rather less important. Then why stick with algebra and calculus? Frankly, I agree with Hacker: quadratic equations are boring. Teaching number theory will do better job of teaching pattern recognition and deduction. More Fermat's little theorem, more Chinese remainder theorem, less quadratic equations. I found undergraduate number theory to be far easier and more fun than calculus, and you need no calculus to start on number theory.
- doc4t 14y ago
  > You seem to imply that actual mathematical content is rather less important No. The point was that it is much more than what you call the content.

podperson 14y ago

Well, it's not an example of Betteridge's law ;-) The political science professor in question might consider the fact that while many college students struggle with basic math, they struggle just as much with basic literacy (most undergraduates can't write grammatical sentences, use punctuation, don't know how to write an essay, and have a hazy grasp of the idea of citation). Extending his argument we might consider removing History and English from the curriculum.

sharms 14y ago

I would say that the basic college level math courses have helped me tremendously in non-obvious ways. Companies run on spreadsheets and formulas, and to better predict and analyze situations, it is easier if all parties involved have a common understanding. Our economies are huge, number driven in almost every aspect. To ignore that or turn out graduates are less well rounded would not be more productive as a whole.

PaulHoule 14y ago

people say they want science and math skills but do they really? when i was a 10 yr old kid in 1982 i wanted to create email and newsgroup type systems and my computer science teacher was like that's a big waste of time like video games, get thinking about data structures and algorithms instead 10 years later I'm in college and the guy who runs the computer center got a source code license for SunOS and fubar-ed our whole system because he wanted to block our access to the internet, which would stop our academic pursuits. hell we were just trying to be matt zuckerberg a decade before his time. or there's this guy who was the one bright kid who remembered what he learned in organic chemistry class. all the other muggles sold their textbooks and forgot about it, but he applied what he learned to invent a way to make a new drug with stuff you can buy at the grocery store. this grad school dropout got his work cited in the "journal of emergency medicine" because some kid made a batch of this vile brew and chucked all over his bed and the doc in the ER is like "what the f'uh?", "i mean you read this on the f'en internet and really did it?" And all this time this guy and his crew are worried they're going to get called to testify about this in Congress and they were just so happy when the statue of limitations came up. If students studied science and engineering and got both the ability and the will to confront technological society, we'd have a revolution.

apl 14y ago
A little coherence goes a long way.
- PaulHoule 14y ago
  ...and James Joyce showed you can get lit profs to take what you write seriously without any coherence
  - gcv 14y ago
    ...only in Finnegans Wake. And let's be fair to English professors, many of them don't take that book too seriously. :)

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

impendia 14y ago

"Nobody ever brags about not knowing how to read, but people brag all the time about not knowing how to do math." This is not just math, it's virtually every subject you learned in school. Imagine the following at a cocktail party: "I had to read Joyce, Whitman, and Hawthorne, but I never got the point of any of them." "I took a lot of history, it was a bunch of dates which I could never remember." "I took three years of Spanish, but I don't remember a word." Et cetera.

quacker 14y ago
You're right, but he's claiming this at a lower level. I imagine it's more embarrassing to have to ask, "What does this say?" than to have to ask, "How much change should I receive?"
excuse-me 14y ago
Same with engineering - just read any sunday paper home section article. Somebody will be saying that they can never assemble some piece of Ikea furniture. This stuff is designed so that a 5year old could follow instructions but anyone stylish has to look like they can never use their hands. Imagine you are an engineer and faced with a McD menu it would be fashionable to point and say = I'll have that one, I can never do words and numbers.
toomuchcoffee 14y ago
All perfectly understandable. It's called "the path less taken." A lot of people just don't click with formalized education at all in their early years. They just couldn't throw themselves behind all those authors and facts they're "supposed to" be up on. Some of them are too busy learning informally by dealing with the world around them -- i.e. with things like nature, work, and you know, other people. Then slowly grow to form their own view of the world, and seek their own path to obtaining a more structured comprehension of it -- which might well mean starting (on their own volition) formalized education sometime in their 20s or 30s -- or perhaps not. A great many who choose this route, or have it forced upon them may fail or flounder -- but a great many also don't, and end up with accomplishments for others to read about or hear about in those books, classes and received intuition that some people think are the only valid starting points to figuring out how to make a dent in the universe.

excuse-me 14y ago

Does non-maths higher education have a place? Non-technical degrees are now worthless in the job market because everyone has one. So their purpose, showing the best/brightest candidates, is now gone - so why bother doing a non-maths based degree? If companies simply stopped demanding all those eng-lit, art-history and business degrees for every position starting in the mail room those people could all skip college, skip being $100K in debt and leave a lot of higher education funding for science, engineering and even medicine.

Tycho 14y ago

The thing about mathematical literacy and financial contracts (credit agreements etc) is that if those contracts are constructed in such a way as to deliberately confuse the average customer/borrower, then increasing the average level of education wont actually help. The contracts will just get even more confusing to compensate.

DanielBMarkham 14y ago

The future is computers, and computers work through tagged languages and symbolic systems. Everybody needs to understand formal symbolic systems. Math is the best way that I know of to do this. It used to be that to be a composer, first you learned the piano. The piano was thought to give one an appreciation of the nature and nuance of music. From there you could much more easily learn other instruments and then learn how to put them together into something beautiful. Math is the new piano. Learn symbolic manipulation -- and I'd say that means first-year calculus -- and you can work with the kinds of symbolic systems you'll find everywhere else in the modern world. I used to do some tutoring when I was a kid, and I think this level of understanding is achievable by 90% of the population given the right environment. The real question is "why are the structures and environments for education that we create so unable to accomplish this?" Dumbing down the system isn't the answer. It's not like you can dumb down the world to make up for your inability to prepare students for it.

stdbrouw 14y ago
> Math is the best way that I know of to do this. But is it the best way educators know of to do this? Because at the end of the day, whether math is a good basic skill that pays dividends in logical thinking and symbolic manipulation (dividends beyond what other methods could deliver) is an empirical question. What you say sounds plausible, but theories can be plausible and dead wrong.
swordswinger12 14y ago
That is a really pretty analogy. My compliments.
- toomuchcoffee 14y ago
  But is also flawed, because its premise is flawed.
gizmo686 14y ago
Why is first year calculus the standard for symbol manipulation? Algebra is also pure symbol manipulation, and the applications of it are more universal, whereas calculus is symbol manipulation over 2 functions, plus algebra; but those two functions have a lot of conceptual baggage that is not nearly as useful.

pirateking 14y ago

My dream educational system destroys the concept of "subjects" - no more siloing knowledge within artificial boundaries. Students think things like "Algebra is Math and I hate Math so I hate Algebra" or "Math is my worst subject." It is an easy label to associate their failures with. An example of learning without boundaries: One day, I decide I want to play the guitar. I get my hands on one and fiddle around. Perhaps a brief history on the instrument will give me some better context as to why the instrument is shaped as it is, and what all the features are. An exposure to famous guitarists and their music improves my appreciation of music and gives me context to work with. As I continue to struggle with notes and basic music theory, it may be a good time to take a brief detour into the realm of physics - a lesson in simple harmonics. If interested, I can dive further into the required algebra relevant to harmonic equations. Hmm... maybe learning to use a computer program can help me figure out how messing with these waves changes the sound... And so it goes. A familiar story to most hackers, but sadly an approach that most educational systems do not encourage. Is this exploratory form of learning superior? My theory is that the associations formed between nodes of knowledge are necessary for any sort of actual deep learning to occur. By sandboxing subjects, the standard school curriculum limits the possible associations that students think are allowed, thus limiting the probability of successful links between nodes. Even an above average student can graduate from college, and be left with nothing but a bunch of barely reachable random islands of knowledge, floating further out to sea every day. In other words: school sucks, learning rules.

alpine 14y ago
So you aspire to be a Renaissance Man?
- TheAmazingIdiot 14y ago
  I guess you could put it that way. I see in his description more of a tech tree. It'd be more akin to what you'd see in Diablo 2, but expanded by a 1000. The tech tree method would also explain prerequisites. Ideally, if you can prove you have the knowledge of a node, you could pass through it and continue learning. No clue how we would go from factory farmed schools to that though. It's another educational pie-in-the-sky thought.

alpine 14y ago

'...people brag all the time about not knowing how to do math'. This is true, I think, mostly of Anglo-Saxon countries. It is quite a disgusting attitude. In what way is someone's life-chances or overall happiness degraded by a better understanding or skill in the use of numbers and higher mathematical concepts? I consider this anti-maths meme one of the most pernicious aspects of our culture.

sanxiyn 14y ago
I think this is misunderstanding of cause and effect, and correlation does not imply causation. High math skill does correlate with nerdiness, and ceteris paribus, nerdiness does degrade your life chances or overall happiness. It does not mean high math skill alone, if you are not nerdy, will degrade your life chances, but well, they do not have high math skill to understand that. :)
- alpine 14y ago
  I wasn't so much thinking about innate mathematical ability, more the mathematical education most kids should receive. Disparaging attitudes towards maths skills, which is a general rule, is pretty harmful to society, I think.

sanxiyn 14y ago

Go read "How should mathematics be taught to non-mathematicians?" for a mathematician's take on the topic. http://gowers.wordpress.com/2012/06/08/how-should-mathematics-be-taught-to-non-mathematicians/ http://gowers.wordpress.com/2012/06/08/how-should-mathematic...

comicjk 14y ago

> Yes, young people should learn to read and write and do long division, whether they want to or not. Ironic, since in our modern computerized world algebra is important and long division is useless. The writer himself probably carries a powerful computer in his pocket.