A few years ago, Andrew Hacker, the political scientist, wrote an Op-Ed for the Times titled “Is Algebra Necessary?,” in which he proposed eliminating mandatory high-school math. “Think of math as a huge boulder we make everyone pull, without assessing what all this pain achieves,” he wrote. Although some of the article’s readers suspected Hacker of satire, he was as serious as calculus, and has extended his argument in a book called “The Math Myth: And Other STEM Delusions.” Recently, the National Museum of Mathematics, on East Twenty-sixth Street, invited Hacker to defend his assertions in a public debate with James Tanton, the mathematician at large of the Mathematical Association of America, and an educator and consultant.
“I may be the only non-mathematician in the house,” Hacker said in opening, a remark that was met with stony silence. (He was off by a count of one: also present was a reporter who cannot pretend to objectivity, and who admits to weeping with frustration over her fifth grader’s math homework.) Hacker outlined his case: mastery of the high-school-math sequence—algebra, geometry, calculus—is unnecessary for most students, and by making math a requirement for graduation and college entrance, the U.S. educational system sets up for failure millions whose talents might lie elsewhere. “Colleges mindlessly require mathematics of everybody, even if you are going to major in poetry, modern dance, or interior design,” he said.
Hacker, who has taught at Queens College for almost forty-five years, considered some of the arguments put forward by the math lobby—for example, that math sharpens the mind. “I agree that really doing well at it sharpens your mind for dealing with mathematics. But there is no evidence whatever that mastering mathematics makes you agile and adept in other fields,” he said. Hacker cited the cautionary example of Paul Wolfowitz, the former Deputy Secretary of Defense and an architect of the Iraq War: “He was a math major, and his father was a math professor.” Instead, he suggested, schools should offer classes in arithmetic numeracy, insuring that students master the ability to read a corporate report or to parse the federal budget. Higher math, Hacker conceded, is one of humanity’s greatest accomplishments. “I would really love for everybody to appreciate mathematics—its glories, its goals,” he said. “But this isn’t being done by making people slog through polynomials year after year.”
When Tanton took the floor, he paced, TED-talk-like, and spoke in a rapid-fire Australian accent. “I have never used the quadratic formula in my personal life,” he acknowledged. “I don’t think I have ever used it in my research life. But learning the formula wasn’t the point. It was the story of quadratics. And, from that story, I know I can nut my way from most any problem to do with that subject.” Algebra II, he said, need not be too high a bar to set for most students. “The issue is: How do we teach the subject? Do we teach with beauty and joy and wonder and humanness?” Tanton offered one of his own methods for attaining joy and wonder: as a teacher—in a private school, exempt from state standards—he handed out math quizzes that gave both a problem and its answer, but also provided a large white space for students to show how to get from one to the other.
There were a few questions from the audience. A middle-school teacher asked how she might add joy to the curriculum given the demands of the Common Core standards. “Write to your congressman,” Hacker suggested. A high-school teacher from the South Bronx asked whether eliminating mandatory math would only exacerbate the achievement gap. Tanton agreed that it would. “Where’s the line?” he asked. “Do we have it that in grade seven, grade eight, people self-identify as ‘I am going into a career that doesn’t need math—therefore, I will stop it when I am twelve’?”
The math-phobic reporter asked Hacker whether he thought math really is harder than other classes that students are required to take. “Unqualifiedly, yes,” he said. “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 sounds like ‘Seinfeld.’ Math describes much of the world but is all about itself, and it has the most fantastic conundrums. But it is not about the world.”
Tanton was asked how he would counsel the parent of a grade-school student who found no joy in the math curriculum. “Is it taught with context and relevance and meaning?” he asked, sympathetically. On being assured that it was, and that it nonetheless remained stubbornly joyless, Tanton looked taken aback. “Can you let it go? Just have a break from math?” he suggested. The reporter said that she would do so, and would cite his authority in her very next exculpatory note to the teacher. ♦
