UK Forcing maths on the population is straight out of China's playbook - I mean the alternative seems to be teaching kids 90780970 gender identities and how whitey is bad

The most useful maths I ever learned I learned between the ages of five and nine, including memorisation of times tables, fractions, percentages and division. These come into daily life and understanding them on a very basic level is completely essential. Beyond that, attempts to force maths down my throat and have it digested as meaning something other than terror and confusion – and there were a great many attempts – came to little. That’s not quite fair. When I put my mind to it I found I liked numbers, so long as I wasn’t forced to go beyond say quadratic equations (of which I now remember nothing).

If only someone sensible who is bad at maths but successful at life could have sat down with Rishi Sunak before he announced a policy to make all schoolchildren take maths till 18.

This is a pointless and unpleasant idea. Unpleasant because for those who struggle with maths, it is a deeply humiliating, fruitless process being made to do it to a level beyond the basic. And they will never remember it as anything other than hell - in short, it’d put them off for life.

Now to the pointless. These days, it is unclear exactly what purpose all those years of forced maths would be. Anyone can turn to an iPhone or Google for fast calculations, simple or complex. Yes, lack of maths skills might mean we don’t know what questions to ask our calculators or browsers but then do all maths types know what questions to ask of Shakespeare's sonnets – and is that a problem? Not particularly. And the benefits of maths and numeracy are hardly kept secret. Any pupil knows that if they want to become affluent, they’ll probably need maths – all banking, management consultancy, IT and insurance jobs, plus any other remunerative line of work arguably bar law, requires a decent level. But it’s up to them whether they want to pursue such a path. It’s not Rishi’s job to decide it for them.

Britain is meant to be a society where individualism can flourish, and that surely ought to include education. In the Soviet Union or China, enforced maths for all might have been de rigeur, but here in Blighty, those who like or want to pursue digits should have every encouragement, and those who don’t should be allowed to devote themselves to things they like. That way, one day, if they feel it’d be good to know more maths, they may actually feel like learning some.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/01/08/forcing-maths-population-straight-chinas-playbook (Archive)

 

[pikachudidnothingwrong]

The prog left: "We NEED to open the borders to the masses for the sake of more workers!"
Also the prog left: "Nooooo you can't educate US children! REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE"

Hmmmmmmmm..........

 

[Kheapathic]

If you don't have a grasp of basic math, you'll be taken advantage of in one way or another; mainly because simple addition/subtraction is a core of monetary transactions. If you can't make change, you'll be taken advantage of and not even know it. Algebra is simple problem solving, in math form; if you can't handle that, higher thought processes might be beyond you. I'm not asking you to be a rocket scientist or even half-assed decent at Algebra. But what I am asking is for any construction trade to know how much dry wall, cable, tiling, etc will be needed by doing simple area calculations. I'm also asking for the lady handing me a baconator be able to make change without a machine. If you can't do either of those... ... ... you can be used for fertilizer.

Also, if you don't want whitey to force education on the darkies; stop fucking importing them.

 

[Fomo Hoire]

So when you ask primary school kids "I have 5 apples in one hand and four apples in the other. What do I have in total?" (Answer: nine apples and two very large hands) that's algebra is it?

I'd consider the bare minimum requirement for math to "be" algebra to be an understanding that variables exist and can be moved around. (Variables without the ability to manipulate them is the intro unit of algebra. Multiple variables is normal but a single variable that is interpreted differently based on context is acceptable).

The apple problem, I wouldn't call algebra because they aren't manipulating the numbers once they've translated the equation. Now if you scaled up the problem, 100 beaners picked apples, sum up all the apples in all 199 of their hands (handicapped beaners count too), yeah, you'd probably manipulate those numbers, that's algebra.

The beer problem, if asked in school, would not algebra either. Nor would it be if I left it to an Uber eats driver to fetch as many beers as is possible.

But solving that in the real world with the intention of drinking the consequences of the math? Yes that's algebra, because there's that remainder to deal with, and that has to be optimized.

Spoiler: Alcoholic Autism

In school, if the answer has a remainder, either express it as a fraction or decimal, end of story. It is usually valid to say you are able to buy 3.3 items. I never got asked how many beers I can buy in school, the more usual problem would be reagents and unit conversions.

In the real world, you can't buy a fraction of a beer. If you're buying by the mug, you get integers and have to separate out the remainder and decide what to do with it. Due to the wording of the prompt, I'm guessing the goal is to drink as much as possible and the extra might go into a cheaper beer, like so

$20 / [cost] = [quantity, decimal]

$20 / [cost] = [quantity, integer] + [waste]

$20 = ([cost] * [quantity]) + [extra budget]

$20 = ([good beer] * [quantity A]) +([cheap beer] * [quantity B]) + [unspendable quantity, ideally 0]

A few things happened in the above equation. The $20 is now isolated on its own side of the equal sign, I'm no longer dividing it. Depending on how each person's brain is wired the rewrite might look different, but for me it's simplest to go budget = shopping cart. Moving those variables is algebra.

The remainder isn't being divided by the cost of the secondary beer, that variable has been secretly replaced with a 0 and a goal has been added to balance the two beer types to maximize beer within the allowed budget. In theory it is possible to choose to purchase less good beer in order to obtain a larger quantity of shit tier beer and get even more wasted.

PEMDAS is also in effect now.

If you're buying cases, instead of types of beer the two variables might be the size of the package and the unit cost.

Asking how many beers $20 is worth like an accountant might not be algebra, but asking how many beers you can get for $20 like a challenge sure is.

 

[KiwiFuzz]

Here's the problem and it's going to involve some powerleveling.

Young KiwiFuzz was bored with basic addition, etc. and this made her lazy and unmotivated. Therefore, young KiwiFuzz got the idea in her head that she was bad at math. Her high school report card was like a stuck piano key: CCCCCCCC.

Years later, in university, she found her true passion in life. Not going to give more information than that this was a science discipline. Many of her classmates suffered through these science classes, but she enjoyed them and found she had an interest and a talent.

The problem is that this involved loads of math. So she had to pull her shit together and apply herself. Much to her surprise, she found that if you go to class and do all the homework, math is fairly straightforward.

However, math is, well, additive. She was constantly faced with problems that involved remembering how to do things she hadn't seen since high school, and since she had been lazy and unmotivated in high school, this made things a lot harder on her than they would have otherwise been.

The moral of the story is that a teenager might decide four years later that she wants to be a scientist, but she will have fucked herself by not taking math seriously.

But literally everyone should be required to have basic algebra, geometry, consumer math, and statistics. You will wander through life as a moron without these things.

 

[Penis Drager 2.0]

Practical math first, abstract/higher second.

Good thing we literally already fucking do this.
From being a little kid trying to figure out how many apples you have left to a preteen doing basic budgeting problems to calculating the focal point in an amphitheater as a teenager: it's all practical math of escalating complexity. That's what word problems are.

 

[Manul Otocolobus]

I would say that they most kids need to master linear algebra. They should still learn into early calculus just to be exposed to the material. Surprisingly you may find you like it or need it one day.

 

[Plague Dog]

Basic division is algebra?

When it's 5x = 20 yeah it is.

 

[Snekposter]

"who wrote this article? Bet it's a woman!" I thought before clicking the link to check. Carpenters math is enormously useful for all those icky chuds that does manual labor for a living and don't have a PhD in personal essays.

Knowing the basics of trigonometry is also quite handy since its just higher level geometry, so its easy to apply for things like say, laying out a garden plot in an oddly shaped space and determining your surface area for planting and topsoil, or figuring out distances to an object when you don't have a fixed right angle to use. But when you get into the advanced algebra that leads into calculus you start running into serious questions from literally everyone not a STEM major about just how useful it is.

Literacy and numeracy are the keystones of education.

Well, literacy and numeracy are the twin bedrocks of critical thinking and problem solving, and we can't have that if we want everyone running around helpless and addicted to debt and the service economy.

I wish I were joking, but do you have any idea what would happen to the numbers if people knew how do to basic things for themselves instead of plopping down their credit cards and paying someone else to do it on credit? Yes, the numbers are bullshit and fabricated, but won't someone think of the economy and all these phoney-baloney jobs numbers that are a net drain?

I have a raging hate boner against mnemonics.

Yeah, but PEMDAS (Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally) is fun, since me and a bunch of other sixth graders changed it to "Please Excuse My Demented Aunt Samuel" back when you could make jokes like that.

 

[Stoneheart]

If only someone sensible who is bad at maths but successful at life could have sat down with Rishi Sunak before he announced a policy to make all schoolchildren take maths till 18.

you didnt had math your whole schooltime till now?

You're also introduced to simple concepts like measuring and diluding.

you learn that in other science classes sicne its very basic stuff and you only need to train it abit to get quicker.

If you've ever tried to figure how many beers you can get with the 20 in your pocket, congratulations you've just done algebra.

25 cheap cans...

I love explaining this too! If you drink a little more than a six pack on the weekend, does that mean that you drink 1 beer every day on average? It's so fun watching people figure that is technically true but doesn't accurately describe reality in a meaningful way.

how is anybody supposed to answer that if we have no information on weekday drinking?

 

[Starved Artist]

How about we include taxes and tax code into math classes?

Just replace the math you'll never use in your life (outside of engineering and computing) with math that everyone should be able to gleam some use out of , at some point in their lives.

 

[Hammerstein]

This is a pointless and unpleasant idea. Unpleasant because for those who struggle with maths, it is a deeply humiliating, fruitless process being made to do it to a level beyond the basic. And they will never remember it as anything other than hell - in short, it’d put them off for life.

By doing this you are basically depriving students of the most important lesson someone their age has to learn.

You are not as smart as you think.

 

[Individualism Incarnate]

Just don't expect the STEM departments in college to stoop to your level.

STEM-fag here, they've already dumbed down the math requirements for just about everything.

 

[Seventh Star]

These are the same people I was confused about being pissed that we had to do trigonometry. It's literally just identify which of 3 equations you use and input it into the calculator or do the long division, why the fuck is it so hated? What is wrong with people nowadays not wanting to understand numbers and equasions? This also makes me remember the whole 'decolonizing math' thing that never took off, is there a war on math no one's noticing?

I can do differential equations with no problem, I just really hate geometry and triangles.

lmao what is this
I have a raging hate boner against mnemonics. They don't do anything but obscure instances of educational failure. Trig is fundamental. You get there from geometry, graphs (of functions), mechanics, basic calculus, imaginary numbers, electromagnetism. You need to have this sine-cosine thing in your bones, like I have residual radiation from chokeberries. Anyone who resorts to mnemonics can't fucking read. If you ever get so drunk/high you can't remember whether it's sin or cos that trends to zero, you need to be recalling sinx / x and going "oh yeah right lmao", not "uh does 'a' stand for antithetical maybe?".


The older you get, the less time you have for learning new things, and the less time you have for the investment to pay off. But it's never too late for linear algebra, or number theory, or graphs (as in connected vertices). They're beautiful. (Fuck differential equations though.)

Imagine explaining to a 15 year old thinking about cooze the sine and cosine functions, and furthermore squeezing triangles into that.

Also speak of the devil. Differential equations are precious.

 

[IAmNotAlpharius]

You need to be able to perform basic algebra to function in society so it might be a good idea to get that squared away. Anything more complicated is going to be wasted effort when 90% of your students go on to become janitors and cashiers.

I want my cashiers to be able to count.

 

[Paul Pelosi's Boyfriend]

I want my cashiers to be able to count.

I think you misunderstand the purpose of state funded education.

 

[Sparkling Yuzu]

I don't think they should have a certain number of required subjects in x area like you need so many math and science credits to graduate. Not for SJW reasons. Just having enough credits in number should be enough to graduate high school. People should pursue what they are good at and what interests them.
Plus some people have dyscaluclia or other math related disabilities and will have to drop out if they are denied accommodations, for whatever reasons. You can't expect people's brains to magically heal bc the government said they HAVE TO take maths, or else.

 

[IAmNotAlpharius]

I think you misunderstand the purpose of state funded education.

To milk the American tax payer and to make the next generation even more compliant?

 

[Amber the Hedgehog]

I don't think they should have a certain number of required subjects in x area like you need so many math and science credits to graduate. Not for SJW reasons. Just having enough credits in number should be enough to graduate high school. People should pursue what they are good at and what interests them.
Plus some people have dyscaluclia or other math related disabilities and will have to drop out if they are denied accommodations, for whatever reasons. You can't expect people's brains to magically heal bc the government said they HAVE TO take maths, or else.

I disagree. There should be reasonable minimum so that you try out basics to discover if you are intrested in a subject. Sujects can look dull or hard but turn out be something you exel at when you get past the early stages. People benefit from being exposed to many things so one can informed decision what to pursue and easiest way is to have some basic requirements on many topics.

This has the benit of meeting and working with people into other areas. Witch not only mirrors real work environments but allows you to make new friends and potentially useful connections that you other would miss. Also many subjects overlap somewhat and having basic functions down is useful and overall saves everyones time.

 

[PipTheAlchemist]

This is not going to be the miracle policy everyone in this thread thinks it is. Anglos are still going to be fucktarded at Math. With or without two more years of Math forced down upon them
Just seems like an excuse to shit-on the faggot writer of this article. Which is all fine and good. You just don't need to defend some other retard (Pajeet McWhatshisface) in the process

 

[Matt Damon]

I routinely used basic geometry even when I worked some dumb-dumb job at a hardware store.

Being able to calculate a hypotenuse or figure out the area of an irregular shape is pretty vital in a ton of domains in the "real world".