The Tyranny of Math

It’s time we rethink our commitment to higher math for math’s sake.

We recently celebrated an historic occasion in my household: the day my 16-year-old daughter officially dropped math.

With the completion of her final exam for her grade 11 math course, the entire family feels collectively liberated from a scourge under which we have all suffered: the ideology of math.

I know what you’re thinking. How appalling that we are celebrating the fact that our daughter has summarily closed off access to all those fabulous, well-paying, intellectually challenging careers such as engineering and physics. That’s right. And for your information, yes, I am a self-respecting feminist. In fact, our daughter attends a feminist and social justice oriented private girls school in Toronto.

A corrective to your assumed horror is in order. My husband and I have six university degrees between us. He went to law school and is now a successful mediator/arbitrator in private practice. I’m entrenching myself in a second career as an academic and am (she said very immodestly) a wannabe public intellectual. We both dropped math early on and never looked back. We took it as long as it was required to get into our universities of choice and then sensibly got down to studying what we loved and were frankly good at.

Are we a bad, insidious influence on our daughter regarding this question? Probably.

As a teacher, I fail to take higher math seriously. It entails a specialized rather than a generally required body of knowledge. Certainly a knowledge of math is required to be a physicist or an engineer, but this is no different from languages being necessary for work in non-English countries, or English composition being required for virtually any career in government or business.

How, exactly, will learning quadratic equations, trigonometry, or calculus assist my daughter in living her life responsibly and effectively? Instead, she opted for the “non-university” math option, which in Ontario is appropriately called “Math for Everyday Life.” It’s generally viewed as the “math for dummies” course. She learned about the purpose and calculation of taxes, how to make the crucial decision to buy or rent a car (along with the comparable costs of public transit), how to balance a chequebook, and how to amortize a mortgage. She excelled by the way. I wish a similar math course had been an option for me. As it was, I simply pressed the delete key on my brain’s understanding of algebra and never thought about it again. I had to learn all the useful math as I bumped my way through life.

Higher math, I have been repeatedly told, is necessary to teach critical thinking and analytical skills. So, I would counter-argue, are courses in philosophy and law. Math does not hold a monopoly as a method for teaching problem solving, quick thinking, or ingenuity. Consider the following: Singaporean students are consistently the best math students in the world according to the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, the gold standard for comparing math education worldwide. But Singaporean government officials visit the United States to figure out how to teach their students to think more creatively and reward innovation. Apparently all that rote learning and teaching to the test isn’t panning out that well.

Now, I’m sure that North American schools, particularly those that are well supported by governments or parents, teach math differently and do so well. My larger point is that to be successful in the knowledge economy, our overly-rigid and obsessive fixation with math as the only means to creative problem-solving is misplaced.

Moreover, promoting math as an ideology, like all ideologies, requires the energetic suppression of dissent and significant negative judgement of alternatives, all perceived as lesser and inferior. In high school, the students who excel at math are often considered the best and brightest and receive the accolades of both peers and teachers. Those who “drop math” are counselled against it and are seen as pursuing less intellectually rigorous options.

It’s time to rethink our commitment to higher math for math’s sake. We need to figure out what educational ends we want and find creative and multiple pathways to reach them, liberating the math-oppressed in the process.