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)

 

[PipTheAlchemist]

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".

I don't live in Africa or Columbia. Why would I ever need to know how to calculate a hippopotamus?

 

[Johnny Salami]

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

The more yiu see jt the better off youll be. Plus im sure science teachers would be pissed if they had to start from scratch

PEMDAS (Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally)

I hate PEMDAS because people see the order of the letters and think that M>D and A>S when they're the same order. Somewhere along the way that was lost

 

[Rusty Metal Skull Gun]

I'm not at all convinced that more than 50% of the population are capable of doing post-GCSE maths. Not because A-level maths is particularly difficult, but there's a lot of stupid people out there.

 

[Tasty Tatty]

A couple of times, a popular journo here was live talking about something involving numbers and he fucked up each time. He laughed at it saying "I'm a journo, I don't know any of this, I'm a journo because I hate maths".

That's the spirit. Just say "I'm bad at maths". Guess what, many STEM people are bad at writing. I know a bunch of STEM people who can't even spell right. Once you graduate, you can ask or pay others more capable to do that job for you.

But no, instead, we have morons saying "If I don't know this thing, then nobody should either!"

 

[Jet Fuel Johnny]

I hate this bullshit of "If I can't understand it, because I'm an inbred fucking moron who will coast through life on the work of others, then we have to get rid of it!"

Fucking Skinner hit it on the head.

"We cut the stuff for the smart people because they're smart enough to understand why. If I cut stuff for the dumb kids and their dumber parents, they're in here, furrowing their brows, futilely trying to understand something beyond them."

Public school used to be halfway worth a shit. Then they started ripping it apart to make sure the budget could pay the superintendent and the other high ranking leeches million dollar salaries a year while the kids got to deal with 40 year old textbooks and retard teachers who can't pronounce words right.

I still remember when I moved to certain area in 7th grade and I saw the English teacher moved her lips when she read to herself and one of the math teachers counting on their fucking fingers. So glad we moved away after a couple of months, because, holy shit, the teachers were complete retards to where anyone could see it.

 

[Stoneheart]

That's the spirit. Just say "I'm bad at maths". Guess what, many STEM people are bad at writing. I know a bunch of STEM people who can't even spell right. Once you graduate, you can ask or pay others more capable to do that job for you.

but thats icky! our compuscience bros have just solved that problem, we now give our notes to the AI and the AI puts out readable stuff.

"We cut the stuff for the smart people because they're smart enough to understand why. If I cut stuff for the dumb kids and their dumber parents, they're in here, furrowing their brows, futilely trying to understand something beyond them."

basic math isnt just for smart kids, i can do math and im not that smert.

 

[CaptainAutism69]

Oh no! Not a basic skill that all people in a functioning society should have a grasp of! The horror!
That leaves less time for gender studies and fag appreciation events

 

[Manul Otocolobus]

I think you misunderstand the purpose of state funded education.

I think you meant to write "State funded daycare"...

 

[Drag-on Knight 91873]

I hate this bullshit of "If I can't understand it, because I'm an inbred fucking moron who will coast through life on the work of others, then we have to get rid of it!"

Fucking Skinner hit it on the head.

"We cut the stuff for the smart people because they're smart enough to understand why. If I cut stuff for the dumb kids and their dumber parents, they're in here, furrowing their brows, futilely trying to understand something beyond them."

Public school used to be halfway worth a shit. Then they started ripping it apart to make sure the budget could pay the superintendent and the other high ranking leeches million dollar salaries a year while the kids got to deal with 40 year old textbooks and retard teachers who can't pronounce words right.

I still remember when I moved to certain area in 7th grade and I saw the English teacher moved her lips when she read to herself and one of the math teachers counting on their fucking fingers. So glad we moved away after a couple of months, because, holy shit, the teachers were complete retards to where anyone could see it.

A 40 year old textbook is going to say that a man is different from a woman and that 2+2=4. A Common Core textbook is going to say there are many different genders and 2+2 can be visualized as ones stacking on top of each other or that the twos are the same and belong together to make a four.

So how is an out of date textbook bad?