As a professional nerd, I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been asked what I think of Rishi Sunak enthusiasm for mathematics. It’s hard to know what to say. I agree with much of what Sunak said in his speech last month singing the praise of numbering. Yet there is little sign of action to match the fine words.
It’s not just Sunak’s strange obsession with forcing people to learn more math at the age of 17, when the most pressing need is to teach math better and more and to support younger children. It is also the fundamental disconnect between rhetoric and politics. There is a long-standing maths teacher shortage in the UK and teacher pay has been cut by around 10% in real terms between 2010 and 2022, with further cuts looming. How this will help Sunak achieve his goal of a more numbered UK is a mystery.
It was Shakespeare, not square roots, who gave me a moment of clarity on all of this. Shakespeare played by a chatbot, that is. A couple of weeks ago, a student’s homework Twelfth night it went viral. The essay the student submitted began, “I’m sorry, but as an AI language model, I am unable to complete this assignment. However, I can give you some pointers on how to approach this essay.
The teacher’s feedback was not unreasonable: “ChatGPT – Rewrite the assignment in your own words.”
It’s hard to know whether to laugh or cry; this was a student so completely disinterested in homework that they couldn’t be bothered to read even the first sentence of the essay they’d asked ChatGPT to write for them, let alone follow the advice the chatbot was providing.
What does all this have to do with math, you ask? Well, I see the same utter disengagement everywhere on the subject of numbers. To take a fun example: after the billionaire Michael Bloomberg failed to come close to becoming US president in 2020, someone on Twitter gloated that “Bloomberg spent $500 million on advertising. The population of the United States is 327 million. He could have given every American $1 million and still have some money left over.”
Of course, if you have $500 million and you split it among 327 million people, you’ll run out before you’ve given each of them their second dollar. What’s astonishing about the tweet isn’t the error—we all make mistakes—but the fact that on primetime television, senior reporters Brian Williams and Mara Gay discussed the tweet without realizing it was absurd. None of them, nor the MSNBC production team, seem to have checked the arithmetic.
Perhaps this is absolute innumerability; maybe they checked and didn’t find the error. I doubt it. It is more likely that the entire camera crew displayed the same attitude as Shakespeare’s hapless “student”: they didn’t feel that even the most basic check was worth the five seconds it would take.
When calculators first became popular, people feared that students would use them to cheat. “You have to learn arithmetic because you won’t always have a calculator with you,” I remember being told. But these days we always have calculators with us. Perhaps people should have cared less about people using calculators to cheat and more about people not bothering to use calculators at all.
What’s missing in both cases is a set of related attributes: motivation, curiosity, confidence, and a sense of what’s possible. People can’t be bothered to engage, they don’t care what they might discover, they feel they couldn’t dig deeper if they tried, and they have no idea what they might achieve if they did. We have allowed too many young people to find themselves in this situation.
If you feel this way about much of the world around you, life will seem difficult and you will miss out on many opportunities. But if you’re feeling this way just about the arithmetic in snarky tweets, congratulations: You might have a bright future ahead of you as a cable TV host.
Sunak characterized the problem as an economic one: people without basic numeracy skills are twice as likely to be unemployed as the numbered, he said. (We ignore the fact that this statement conflates correlation and causation; the point is well understood even if the rationale is fragmented.) But there is more at play here: if people feel powerless in the face of numbers, they will be vulnerable and frustrated from the supermarket to the voting booth. It is not a basis for a happy and healthy society.
Tempting as it is to offer a tidy solution, I don’t have one. It certainly doesn’t hurt to give children more math support, from well-trained and well-paid teachers, much sooner. It also can’t hurt to teach kids about tools they can use to solve practical problems in the world around them, whether it’s a chatbot, internet search, or even the humble calculator.
Otherwise, the costs are serious. When I was a child, my mother taught math classes for adults. She sometimes came home sadly describing how helpless her students felt in the face of numbers and the suffering she had caused them as they looked for work and tried to stay away from people who would exploit them. But they were all determined to learn, and they all understood what was at stake. Alongside the pitiful anecdotes there were stories of hope.
If young people feel that math is a tool they can use to avoid being scammed, to help spot clues or peel the surface of what they hear and read, or even (perhaps) to get a better paying and more fulfilling job, this is all for the good. It’s basically not about calculus or cosines. It is about curiosity and trust.
Tim Harford’s children’s book, “The Truth Detective” (Wren & Rook), is now available
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