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Andrew Hacker has just written an article for The New York Times titled “Is Algebra Necessary?” His point is that algebra is too tough for many students, so it might be best to simply stop teaching it. Then fewer kids would drop out of high school or college.
Seriously.
Is this what academia has descended to?
Hacker is an emeritus professor of political science at Queens College, City University of New York, and a co-author of “Higher Education? How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids — and What We Can Do About It.” He is clearly a well-intentioned individual whose academic discipline, political science, has little use for mathematics outside of statistics. (So of course, Hacker feels that although other fields of math are largely unimportant, statistical training should remain in the curriculum.)
Hacker makes the point that it is perseverance, rather than mathematical ability, that enables students to take on demanding jobs. In my own experience, however, many students refuse to go into engineering—despite their obvious talent for and interest in technical topics and general ability to persevere—because of their poor preparation in, and fear of, mathematics. In other words, it doesn’t matter whether these kids can persevere—they simply didn’t get the necessary preparation in math to get them out of a “would you like fries with that” career.
Often all it takes is one bad mathematics teacher in middle or high school for the student to falsely begin labeling him or herself as “bad at math.” Many prominent critics have pointed to the problematic nature of US mathematics education, which is leading to the US falling further and further behind internationally in mathematics, despite the ever-increasing amounts of money being spent on students and teachers. As witness to this, from 1971 to today, adjusted for inflation, the US has doubled the money spent per student. Yet US math scores during that period remained the same, even as other countries, which spend far less per student, are vaulting past.
Hacker wishes to make the problem go away by simply eliminating the teaching of the foundations of mathematics.
Wow.
