Rishi Sunak is clearly gripped by maths. Today’s attack on what he sees as Britain’s “anti-maths mindset” is his second this year. The prime minister wants to embarrass all innumerates and make not being good at maths socially unacceptable. Lack of maths, he says, is costing the country “tens of billions a year”. So he wants students in England to study maths in some form until they are 18, with a review forthcoming.
Ever since Margaret Thatcher, certain politicians have been obsessed by maths – and for one reason. Its results are quantifiable, measurable and susceptible to central control. Yet two of the most successful countries in the supposed endgame of maths – the science industries – are the US and Britain, and they rank 17th and 38th in the Pisa international rankings for maths. In other words, for the minority of pupils whose careers require maths – and who keep Britain in the top leagues for Nobel prizes – the nation’s maths seems good enough. It is fine too for those for whom the subject is both fascinating and even beautiful, which includes me.
Even I, and clearly many pupils, simply cannot see the “national” need for a sizeable chunk of our schooling to go on a subject that the overwhelming majority of us will never regularly use in our careers and will soon forget. Its ancient essentials of arithmetic, algebra and geometry seem a million miles from our daily lives. Ordinary people’s knowledge of quadratic equations, calculus, trigonometry, logarithms and primes are not necessary for modern, computer-driven work and play, any more than knowing how a car works is for driving.
This is not to say that nothing needs to change in the world of secondary education. The reactionary ethos of schooling across Britain beggars belief. From the structure of the school day to the fixing of terms, it is enslaved to examinations – under the lash of a governmental inspection regime that, in England, exerts a cruel, Dickensian form of punishment on teachers.
Of course, young people leaving school should understand the elements of maths. They need practical arithmetic, an understanding of measurement, proportion, risk and probability. They badly need to be computer literate. But they also need to know some history or geography, now disgracefully classed as optional in England and Wales at GCSE. They should be exposed far more to sport and the arts, which have been cut back in recent years.
As for Sunak’s educational diktats, how does a politician know what priority should be given to what young people most need? I would think personal finances, the law, and health should carry a far higher priority. Come to that, so should politics. Schools should snap out of their monastic past and teach the science of modern life.
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
This article was amended on 19 April 2023. An earlier photograph caption said that Einstein was writing a density formula for the Milky Way. However, the image shows the equation for a vanishing Ricci curvature tensor, a statement that roughly asks, “is spacetime flat?”.
