Maths Education is Broken—Here’s How We Can Fix It

While I enjoy Dr. Sabine’s YouTube videos, her latest is a logical tome I just couldn’t grasp, unfortunately.

Too heavy.

It will require some re-watching to fully understand her arguments and those of Dr. Nicolas Gisin.

I’ll check my schedule. However, I suffice, it makes for good content-creation fodder. It also helps that I’ve always had my own opinion on how we’re using maths entirely wrong.

We Need to Promote Useful Maths

Currently, the way maths is taught in HS is mostly boring, generic, and useless.

And this is how I also teach (Head down. Blame societal influence, please. Rote memorization is so ingrained in our learners, that many of them hate exploring creative and relevant examples to their lives as children. I tried, trust me. To them, school is school. School is where intuition isn’t required. I won’t give up, though. And neither will whoever believes in the New Curriculum).

Anyway,

In Primary School, everybody learns the important basics. Those that help you count sheep, appreciate how tax percentages are computed, and know about profit and loss with integers.

In Secondary School, you learn harder stuff - vectors, bases, calculus … using generic examples such as points, shapes, lines, blah blah.

This continues until college, and sometimes for decades.

To this challenge, add the tragedy of massive debt.

Any wonder why kids hate maths? I mean, they could go do fun things like TikTok influencing, all day. Even if it means more Eddy Kenzo mathematics (Ugandans relate to this joke).

So why only teach useful stuff (maths) as if it is useless and impossible to make intuitive (lines, shapes, tangents, binomials, probability graphs, etc)?

There should be something on the side where they go explore directly relevant maths skills, as Elon Musk was doing at age 12 when he sat down to code Blaster. Lessons on how to count social media likes, and how to graph them, versus counting bare numbers, will go a longer way.

Making kids wait 25 years to then start learning the context of the mathematics they're being taught inside some corporation that pays them peanuts then fires them, is a misuse of their childhood desire to play, explore, and learn to be useful without begging for a job.

Show me a childhood where they played while being contextually useful instead of spending all day memorizing textbook figures, and I’ll show you the successful adult.

Indeed, this is not how young movie stars learn to make movies. They do not first sit in class to learn lights, drama, action, blah blah.

This is why YouTube is a top career destination for children in democratic countries like America.

In China and India, they are culturally forced to do these hard things. Perhaps because of the hypercompetitive nature of those nations (they have billions of people crammed in a small space. Effective competition is taught early, not necessarily by the parents, but more by the circumstances of their childhood).

Absent natural competition, most countries would rather waste money on things that make no sense. Like [insert wasteful government spending project] instead of what these kids actually care about all the time - Games, Googling, Social Media, Movies, AI, Music, Clothes, Cars, Planes, etc.

Mathematize all these early on while keeping with the fast-paced context of the times, and we shall unlock prodigies we never knew existed—without the grind through context-less stuff.

The way India and China have unlocked their chess geniuses, coding geniuses, and rocketry geniuses.

Like Dr. Gisin, I say we should do intuitive maths that won’t be simply forgotten the minute they walk out the school gate.

It is why most adults around me lament, “What was the use of sine and cosine?” with a chuckle and a swig of their beer.

Make maths interesting, and you will have more hardcore mathematicians, not less. More super quantum mathematicians will not be taught maths through a grind.

It is simply a marketing problem. We are marketing how hard, boring, and disconnected from reality mathematics is. Let’s market how connected mathematics is to reality.

Mathematics for Better Decision-Making

The most important mathematics any of us will use in our lives pertains to profits, losses, and counting money.

When adults wake up in the morning, the first thing they do is look at the stock graph, their wallet, and how much toothpaste is still in the tube.

Thereafter, they go to work through endless traffic. They finally arrive at their desks and try to calculate how they will be productive that day.

If they work in marketing, they will spend money using the mathematics of statistical figures so that they bump up the good figures and push down the bad figures.

The whole point is to make more money and take off with that positive quadratic curve. How to tweak it for a faster climb upward? Tweak it with more money for influencers, more productive hours at the office, a bigger smile, a stronger handshake, and more running across the city. Do it.

I mentioned social media influencing. Add it to the maths curriculum, for goodness’s sake.

Even an AI bot like @truth_terminal is a big social media influencing star.

Adults in marketing will always need to pay for social media influencing so that their corporate profits graph is more positively quadratic.

All ya’ll wanna count is tomatoes and vegetables and kilograms of maize. Yet less than 10% of the classroom either do or even care about cooking or farming.

So when will they count tomatoes? Never.

Here are other things to mathematize in the high school curriculum. Things that would strongly push a child towards phenomenal performance in whatever career they work in as an adult because as mentioned, profit margins put food on the table;

likes, retweets, metals used in car manufacturing, fossils burnt, fossils left, solar panels made, solar panels that paid for their carbon footprint, clothing bought per month, average time spent designing good clothes, internet speeds, CPU speeds, GPU speeds, Bot speeds, movie time, time spent on social media, time spent working using ChatGPT versus using raw skills, time spent working versus ROI considering different ROIs…

The adult checks the clock, would you look at that, they were actually productive for 4 hours today. The other 4 were spent taking meals, laughing with colleagues, and incessantly looking at the new female colleague across their desk.

5 pm. Time to check out.

“You’re leaving already?”.

“Yup. Time's up”.

“The Manager said we should put in extra hours today”.

“Time is something I calculate very seriously. The Manager’s propositional calculus did not add up, unfortunately”.

“Huh, how did you come to that conclusion?!”

“No time. Took me most of my childhood to figure it out”.