Once in a while a small boy steps out from the sycophantic throng. He raises his arm and points at the preening emperor. “Look at that man,” he cries. “He’s got no clothes.”
This week the boy in question was a Darlington teacher, Terry Bladen. He suggested to a teaching union conference in Bournemouth that the emperor in question was maths. Twenty per cent fewer pupils sat maths A-level last year. Facing the virtual collapse of the subject as a general academic pursuit, the heroic Mr Bladen proposed that compulsory maths was unnecessary. “How often do the majority of people need or use mathematical concepts once they have left schools?” he asked. “Mathematics has always been a main subject,” said Mr Bladen, “but why?”
You could have heard a crozier drop in the Sistine Chapel. Up in Darlington freethinking may be in order, but in the Vatican of Charles Clarke’s mind, mind-numbing conservatism and control hold sway. There the national curriculum is a sacred text. It is a facet of control, to be maintained by rack, thumbscrew and a “missing” £500 million on bureaucracy. Central to that control is the Holy Trinity of maths, science and English, the so-called core curriculum. If the Good Book had commanded Flat-Earthism and wart-charming, Mr Clarke would have targets for them too.
I studied maths to 16. I could sword-fight with a slide rule and consort with logarithms. As in Ronald Searle’s St Trinian’s, I could stalk the square on the hypotenuse and drop a surd at fifty paces. I ate quadratic equations for breakfast and lunched on differential calculus. It was completely pointless. For all the good it did me, I could have been parsing Mongolian verbs.
Like Mr Bladen I accept that some people may need maths to get through a working day. It is an exhilarating hobby for very clever people and needed for advanced physics and in most branches of engineering. But there are also people who need to know how cars work, how to date a henge and how to tell when frogs yawn. These skills do not rate the core curriculum. Every child spends hours learning complex arithmetic that can be done on a 50p calculator. It is like being forced to study torque theory to get a driving licence. Worse, these pupils are given no time to learn even how to write or speak clearly.
An academic in retreat always has one last gasp. He protests that his subject may be useless but “trains the mind”. Why uselessness should hold the key to mental callisthenics has never been explained, let alone proved. Chanting the sayings of Chairman Mao probably trains the mind. The thesis is on an intellectual par with “the shortest route to the brain is through the seat of a boy’s pants”. It is daft. Yet curricular conservatism is the apogee of political correctness. Hundreds of millions of pounds and thousands of teaching hours go on teaching maths. The value for money is totally unaudited.
Maths was a core subject because in the late 1980s the dirigiste Education Secretary, Kenneth Baker, wanted to enforce a national curriculum and allowed the subject lobbies to dictate what should be in it. He was guided by Margaret Thatcher’s belief that “Britain needs more scientists”, and that this meant “more maths”. There was evidence for neither. The maths and science lobbies hogged two of the three compulsory “core curriculum” subjects and more than a third of the timetable. It was pure log-rolling, teachers wanting a safe pool of public sector work. Obsolete coal miners were sacked but obsolete maths teachers won job security.
A result of this coup was, among other things, the demotion of history and geography and the virtual demise of extracurricular music, drama and sport. The irony is that today the subjects most in demand with booksellers and television producers are history, geography, music, drama and sport. The one subject nobody wants is maths. Death to any subject is for a politician to make it compulsory. The Church should plead for a ban on religious education.
For all Mr Clarke’s expensive efforts to prop it up, maths is clearly finished as a major subject. To meet his GCSE targets Britain’s entire annual output of maths graduates would have to teach the subject. Roughly half that number are coming forward now, despite £4,000 bonuses. It is like the cavalry teaching officers to ride horses so as to get enough officers to teach riding to the cavalry. That is modern central government for you.
Maths standards are falling so fast that Coventry University has revealed that a B-grade in maths A-level is roughly equivalent to an “N (fail) grade” in 1991. According to this week’s Economist, half of university maths departments now have “remedial maths” courses for those wishing to study the subject. If maths students can learn university maths from scratch, why not engineering students as well? Why should every child in the country be forced to learn, on the off-chance that he or she might become an engineer?
I can only sympathise with Mr Bladen’s plea for small classes of keen maths specialists “made up of pupils who actually enjoy and want to pursue the subject”. The rest, he says, should be given a grounding in simple numeracy, a subject that has little to do with academic maths. Numeracy is mostly common sense. The American bestseller, Innumeracy by John Allen Paulos, took me an hour to read and taught me more about the handling of numbers in real life than a thousand hours of maths teaching.
Paulos deals with probability theory, proportion, risk management, profit and loss and how to assess insurance scams and medical scares (much needed during the current Sars hysteria). Teachers would regard him as a threat to their professional mystique, as did medieval scribes the advent of printing. But the teaching profession never lobbies for a new subject. It just protects old ones.
As a result, what is taught in schools is still dictated by what teachers were themselves taught, and by what parents think “was good enough for us”. There could be no more reactionary basis for public policy. Lytton Strachey wrote that Arnold, of Rugby, dared to reform the English school system but dared not touch its curriculum. He stuck to “the monastic and literary conceptions of education, which had their roots in the Middle Ages”. Laymen could run schools, but professionals owned the covenant of what they taught.
That meant Latin and Greek. The classics remained at the “core” of the English curriculum in the 19th century while Germany and America surged into maths and science. It took more than a century for Britain to break out of its curricular straitjacket. It broke out just when employers no longer needed maths and science and called for more flexible skills of human communication and imagination. Few job ads demand maths or science A-levels.
Students can read those ads. They know that they have been victims of a crude exercise in social engineering by both Tory and Labour governments. Maths and science can be forced down their throats at school, but even Mr Clarke cannot, as yet, enforce them at university. Maths and science departments are emptying. Instead students are clamouring for law, psychology, accounting, English and creative and media courses. Cynics jeer that this is because they are “soft options”, which means only that they are badly taught. Students know that these subjects relate to a real marketplace, not the Government’s fantasy one.
Millions of pounds are being wasted teaching outmoded subjects to reluctant pupils for no better reason than the prejudice of ministers and teachers. British children leave school backward in literacy and numeracy. They have little knowledge of their surroundings (geography) or of their common humanity (history). The Government encourages them to learn nothing at school of law, medicine, the handling of money, politics, civics or family responsibility, life skills that can equally well “train the mind”. Instead they spend their school years enslaved to a dud educational dogma. Small wonder so many cannot wait to leave.
So three cheers for Mr Bladen. And there is hope. Maths is on the way out and the Government this week declared that it had “no plans to allow children to drop maths as a core subject”. A year ago it had “no plans to invade Iraq”. Watch this space.
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