Fiontan O’Ceallachain
Staff Writer
“Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty, a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture.”
– Bertrand Russell
Education does not begin in school, education begins at birth, perhaps even in the womb. Rolling marbles across a table, sitting on your mothers lap, the world may have been explained in a light different to your future classmates. Your mother maybe showed you how to play a marble game, perhaps she showed how the seemingly still light glints and shines atop the rolling glass sphere, perhaps she named them, painting a colourful story – or perhaps she pointed to them, naming each marble 1, then taking three marbles she named their collective 3 and removed a marble naming this new collective 2.
A few years later you may have found yourself in the kindergarten being introduced to numbers and simple arithmetic. Because of your parent’s interaction you have formed the subconscious ability to thrive in this new mathematical environment – or perhaps not. Perhaps you were the student sitting beside the maths wizz, unable to achieve that competency so easily, yet you better him or her in the literary arena being taught reading and writing from a young age. Or maybe you were the first to be picked for the football team to practice your valuable experience in the world of sports.
The Rising Tide
We live in a society drowning under useless information and commercial indulgence. With or without PISA and its sister-studies, it was and is evident that math scores will fall. Our thoughts are forced into the context of cheap media, lazy satisfaction and financial reasoning. There is hardly a sense of culture in Ireland’s society of today – no awareness of the limits of human imagination, the expressions of sublime and intense beauty – we are simply being led through the shallow waters of statistical interpretation.
It has become overwhelmingly obvious that we as a society are unable to analyse statistics, yet politics government and industry are fueled by these measures. One has only to reach for a newspaper to find the reliance society has on these abstract figures. But it is not our ability to interpret statistical results which is of greatest concern, it is our assumption that these results should steer society. It is as if we have lost our intellectual independence – our ability to peer past the momentary facade of a problem and acknowledge the inherent truth. By the very nature of statistics they do not describe the truth, only approximate a measure that may be related to the truth.
The Falling Blind
The Irish government is introducing a new second level mathematics curriculum named ‘Project Maths’. This is being done through the NCCA (National Council for Curriculum and Assessment) in response to the falling Irish second level maths competency, as implied by several international studies.
“Project maths aims to provide for an enhanced student learning experience and greater levels of achievment for all. Much greater emphasis will be placed on student understanding of the mathematical concepts, with increased use of contexts and applications that will enable students to relate mathematics to everyday experiences.”
Studying a few sample questions I realised that the NCCA have a strange taste for context. The more interesting of these seemed to be easier versions of applied maths questions, another and rather excellent Leaving Certificate course. In fact the entire paper seemed to be a perverted, dumbed down, stats heavy version of the course I studied four years ago.
I recently had an article published on the University Times website describing my impression of maths in society. A 6th year Leaving Certificate student responded:
In the same comment he describes the poor curriculum of project maths and his wish to learn the abstract concepts that ‘real maths’ can offer. Contrary to the claim of the NCCA that higher level project maths is geared towards those who wish to study 3rd level mathematics, project maths contains the minimal amount of the pure maths studied at third level.
The focus of project maths is statistics, a skill which according to the NCCA “…has a value far beyond mathematics wherever data is used as evidence to support argument.” But statistical analysis wont reveal the real reason why Irish maths competency is falling – that the fundamental assumptions and culture of our society are becoming dictated by a commercial media, shallow politics and false government – this vision requires intellectual independence.
We are allowing a confused culture influence a broken education system, we should be fighting for an honest education with the power to heal a confused culture. The irony is that the same problem which inspired this new curriculum makes it all the more difficult to see the problems and dangers of a cosmetic solution.
This article is the second installment of a series titled ‘The Dying Animal’. If you would like to subscribe to the series please email Fin at [email protected].
