Facts Have Ceased to Matter, and So Has a Whole Bunch of Other Stuff: Critic of Mandatory High School Algebra Defends His Position

Here’s an article in The New Yorker that looked like it must have certainly been a joke; it’s one that describes how Andrew Hacker, who claims that algebra should be cut from the core curriculum in U.S. schools, defended his beliefs at a conference at the National Museum of Mathematics.

Said Hacker at the conference: “Every other subject is about something. Poetry is about something. Even most modern art is about something.” He looked around, and lowered his voice to a whisper. “Math is about nothing,” he went on.

It’s worth a moment to consider this.  What does it mean to say that “Math is about nothing?”

To be fair, math is an abstraction. That’s its point.  It’s about the laws that govern what happens in the real world of matter and energy in the absence of the physical matter and energy.

I had an interesting talk with a pre-med student recently who was studying for her entrance exams for medical school, the MCATs.  When I asked her if there was any area of the eight-part test that scared her, she told me that she’s always been weak in physics. I asked if she did well in math, and she responded that she had gotten straight A’s in calculus.  I tried to explain that, given all this, her aversion to physics must be some sort of mental block, because physics is simply about the application of calculus and other branches of math to the real world. I told her, “Anyone who can take the derivative of a quadratic function like f(t) = -16t² + 4t + 26, can most certainly understand that this describes what happens when you stand on a building 26 feet tall, and throw a ball upwards at 4 feet/second in the Earth’s gravity that’s causing stuff to accelerate downward at 32 feet/second.”

It’s also fair to say that math is a tool, like language is to those who wish to communicate, and chisels are to sculptors.  Yet no one wishes to purge English and art from our schools.

If “being about nothing” is a big deal, one could make a similar claim about several of the other disciplines our culture considers vital. History is about nothing, because it describes events that happened in the past, and the past is gone forever.  Philosophy is an even more straightforward example.  Can you show me an example of metaphysics or epistemology in our world?

But the most pressing problem that Hacker’s argument faces is that saying math doesn’t matter is to say simultaneously that science doesn’t matter.  The universe follows laws that humankind can understand only by reference to mathematics, and thus, to agree with Hacker, you need to be saying that kids should be educated without the basic mechanism by which we apprehend and participate in the understanding of the universe.

This means that the U.S. would accelerate its already warp-speed abandonment of any role in charting the course for humanity’s future. Within a short period of time, all that Americans will be good for is performing tasks that will be defined by people in the rest of the world.

As a nation, we’ve already demonstrated a profound lack of respect for and interest in science.  I guess this is a way of completely sealing the deal.