Why should we learn math?

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“Why do I need to know fractions? Square roots? Algebra or geometry? I mean, why do we ever even need them in real life? I am never going to be a mathematician, and I hate math. So why do I have to learn this?”

Unfortunately, because of the way math is usually taught, this is the attitude of a lot of otherwise intelligent people.

Did you ever wonder why almost nobody says, “Why do I have to learn how to read? I am not going to be a writer or a teacher.” Almost no one says, “Why do I have to learn how to walk? I am not going to be a hiker or an athlete.” Wouldn’t it sound silly if someone said that? Yet it makes as much sense as the argument against learning math.

You don’t learn to read so that you can just read schoolbooks. Reading is a tool to gather information. That information may help you learn material, it may entertain you, it may open your mind to new Ideas, it may change your life.

The same goes for walking. You walk to get somewhere. To go and experience things. When you learned to walk, you were (luckily) too young to have negative feelings towards learning. Otherwise you might have said, “What the heck do I want to walk to Daddy for? He can already walk, let him walk to me!”

Now, that you are older, you know that it wasn’t just about walking to Daddy. It was the beginning steps to get you to be able to walk anywhere you want and get to new experiences. You don’t have to be a hiker to know the value you get from walking.

Walking and reading are more basic things than most of the math you may learn in school. They are easy. But walking is easier than reading, yet you didn’t stop there; you did learn how to read.
Why are so many people then, satisfied with stopping at something as simple as reading, and then being beaten so easily by math?

One reason may be because it is not so easily apparent that math and critical thinking have as many payoffs as walking and reading. One of the main payoffs is that it helps you to understand patterns in life and use them in ways you never have before. This does not sound so important.

Remember, though, that when you were a baby, walking to wherever you wanted and having meaningful experiences didn’t sound important either. All you really wanted to do was walk to Daddy. That was a good enough reason for you, in your baby-mind.

So asking for a specific reason to learn math is an appeal to reason for your baby-mind, too. But we are not babies anymore, although school curriculum-makers are still addressing this appeal by the baby-mind. They are trying to entice you to learn math by “problem solving” specific things which may appeal to you right now.

Instead of developing your ability to understand abstractions with your mind, and stretch your ability to think, they like to give you problems like “Kelly wanted to buy lunch. She had $5.22. She could either buy a Happy Meal for w amount of dollars, or a Big Mac for x amount, fries for y amount and a Coke for z if she bought them separately. Find out how much more she would have had to spend if she bought them separately, and how much change she would get back if she bought the Happy Meal.”

In other words, they are spoon-feeding you the problems. They are not really teaching you about concepts, and enabling you to apply those concepts. They are saying, “You don’t really need to know how things work, you just have to solve specific problems, so you can pass your tests and we can get you out of here, and pretend we did a good job.”

Whenever you encounter a problem like the above, you can rest assured that some bureaucratic slug in a bad suit, sitting behind a desk in your state capitol had something to do with it. It is insulting. It is saying “Crawl to Daddy.”

In this case, Daddy is not only the goons who make “standardized tests” and talk about “accountability,” he is also the big, fat corporations who lobby the board of education to brain-wash children in schools to constantly think of their logos, products and corporate names. They are buying children’s brains, and trying to fool you into thinking that they are “sponsoring” your school or your textbooks.

It is the same idea as “Business Math.” The concept of business math is, “These kids are never going to learn anything meaningful, anyway. They are not as smart as ‘we’ are. So let’s just teach them enough to figure out a bill, or do the easy work that ‘we’ don’t want to do, anyway.”

No one should have to learn business math because they had a bad education. Learning applications of math should come after you learn the concepts.

Math should be about your mind, first.

We learn math, because we respect our minds, and are curious about our world. All other reasons are secondary.

If you can ask a person, “Do you respect your mind? Are you curious about your world?” and he says “yes”, he’s just answered the question about why he should learn math. If he says, “no,” then the problem isn’t math, is it?