The Future Of Mathematics Teaching

The following is the text of my letter to the Times Educational Supplement, which was published in April 2012.

Conrad Wolfram is right to argue that we need to rethink our priorities for mathematics education ("Computers do it better", TES, 30 March 2012). It is bizarre, for example, that we still teach students to use tables of probabilities three decades after the calculator ousted the books of logarithms so hated by our parents. Worse, exam boards often ask questions that specifically test the ability to use the tables, rather than focussing on candidates` understanding of what the probabilities really mean.

While such approaches rob the subject of its interest and practicality, resulting in fewer students pursuing it at higher levels, there is even more at stake. Dr Keith Devlin of Stanford University in an article titled "All the math taught at university can be outsourced. What now?" argues that the West`s competitive advantage must come from mathematical creativity; countries like India are already our technical equals and charge a lot less for their skills.

Indeed, Hal Varian, chief economist at Google, has said that "the sexy job in the next ten years" will be that of statistician. Andreas Weigend, formerly chief scientist at Amazon, agrees: "Data is the new oil". Company surveys suggest there is likely to be a serious shortage of suitably qualified data analysts in the years ahead, yet we still seem to expect our bright students to become engineers.

If schools are serious when they claim to be preparing young people for the challenges of the 21st Century, they need to understand that forcing another generation to spend hours solving trigonometric equations and reading books of tables will only result in even more people telling me cheerfully how much they hated maths when they were at school.