It appears that C P Snow’s Two Cultures is alive and well if this monumentally ignorant piece by The Guardian’s Simon Jenkins is anything to go by.
We accept the need for maths in advanced physics and in computing algorithms, much as we accept Greek for archaeology and Anglo-Saxon for early literature. The “mathematics of finance†school at Columbia University is lavishly sponsored by Wall Street firms, for good reason. But that does not mean every primary pupil must spend hours, indeed years, trying to learn equations and πr2, which they soon forget through disuse. Maths is for specialists, so why instil arithmophobia in the rest?
Charge the maths lobby with the uselessness of its subject and the answer is a mix of chauvinism and vacuity. Maths must be taught if we are to beat the Chinese (at maths). Or it falls back on primitivism, that maths “trains the mindâ€. So does learning the Qur’an and reciting Latin verbs.
Meanwhile, the curriculum systematically denies pupils what might be of real use to them and society. There is no “need†for more mathematicians. The nation needs, and therefore pays most for, more executives, accountants, salesmen, designers and creative thinkers.
That attitude betrays quite heroic levels of igorance and prejudice, and it’s not much of a stretch to blame attitudes like his for Britain’s industrial decline. Does he really believe the nation’s economy needs anything like as many archeologists or experts on early literature as it does computer programmers or engineers?
Of course, it’s the programmers and engineers who built the internet infrastructure that enables his ridiculous drivel to reach an audience.