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Math Skills Survey Shows U.S. Lags Behind
3l1za writes "The New York Times reports that the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has released its results (pdf) for a test of mathematical skills given to 15 year olds in 40 different countries. A few apparent anomalies: The US kids rated 28th of 40 (so in the bottom third) while the Czech Republic, which spends in education 1/3 of what the US spends, ranked in the top 10. Further, only about 1/3 of US kids reported that they did not feel as though they were good at math, whereas about 2/3 of Koreans reported this--and the Koreans ranked in the top three. 'Mr. Schleicher said that students in countries that emphasized theorems and rote learning tended not to do as well as those that emphasized the more practical aspects of mathematics.'"
In this country, there's a huge stigma attached to being good at math. If you are good at math, you're a nerd, where as all the cool kids suck at math, and are proud of that fact. Change the perceptions, and you'll go a long way toward improving the scores.
I always wonder, when I hear that East Slobovia has better math scores than the US, whether they are really testing all their schoolkids, or only reporting the average of the top 5%. The US is pretty egalitarian in our education system, compared to your typical poor country.
Have you read my blog lately?
This survey has come out at least once a year for as long as I can remember. "US kids lack in X discipline." Next up: US childhood obesity is the rise.
The day you leave everybody else alone :)
The system had the verbosity of HTML combined with all the readability of compiled assembly viewed as bitmap images
Perhaps instead of demanding more money, schools should evaluate how they are spending the money they already get.
HINT: I bet Czech schools don't spend millions of dollars (or preferred local currency) on state-of-the-art sports facilities and equipment.
There's a Mercedes gap too. I want one and can't afford one, but it's not government's job to do anything about it.
The US School system needs a f'en major overhaul. The money is there (we're #2 in the world in public funding per student behind Sweden).
The system is just horseshit. No responsibility, teachers can't teach, kids are a bunch of bastards, and the parents are taking absolutely no responsibility for the kids.
But of course the answer is more money!
Smart kids aren't cool. I think this is a huge problem in schools. When kids don't want to learn, no amount of education will reach them.
God spoke to me.
I have three kids that will be starting school soon (one of them being in Montessori preschool already). Do I want them to feel good about themselves? Sure, as long as it's because they're doing so well in the classes that they're working hard to excel in. If my kid's flunking math because he won't apply himself, then I want her to feel embarrassed about her performance and not proud of the fact that the school would probably advance her to the next grade anyway.
There are some cripplingly serious problems with the American educational system. A severe overemphasis on underserved self esteem is high on that list.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Everyone = Lazy. It's common to humanity as a whole; that's not the problem. The problem is summed up here:
"'Mr. Schleicher said that students in countries that emphasized theorems and rote learning tended not to do as well as those that emphasized the more practical aspects of mathematics.'"
Exactly. People need to feel that what they're being taught is relevant to them; otherwise, they'll never learn it. I can attest to this, as I'm sure can most people here.
The goal should be to make the children see *relevance* to what they're being taught. That's why I support programs that give kids hands-on reason to use what they learn - for example, ameteur rocketry to get them to learn physics, simple robotics competitions to learn electronics and mechanics, programming competitions to learn computer skills, etc. We need to make being a geek *fun* for kids.
The human body can be drained of blood in 8.6 seconds given adequate vacuuming systems.
This is mostly a cultural issue, not an education system issue. As evidenced by data wherein poor countries outperform the US despite our larger budgets.
Kids, and many of their parents don't care about school or education. They will get what they want. They resist teachers and throw up roadblocks. Many parents simply won't help when a teacher explains that their child needs it. That's what's putting our education system in the toilet.
The only case of education system failure is in misapropriation of money (also a cultural issue). Sometimes a wacko or two in high places decide to fund a pet-project instead of math/reading...
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
I was surprized the first time I came to know that you folks are allowed to use calculators in high school exams!! And can even use programmable graphing calculators in university.
Tell ya somthing. ditch those calculators, and you'll solve half of the problem!
PS: In India, calculators are banned from exams/classes till high school. In university exams/classes you're only allowed to use at max non-prgrammable scientific calculators!
- mritunjai
The water gets stirred up again, and everyone starts screaming that we need to put more money into the school system. If this were a business, we would find out where the money was going and what it was doing. Why is it that many private schools cost far less per student, yet the students get higher scores and better chances at good jobs. Before you start claiming we were all "fortunate sons", the school I went to for half of my highschool years had a tuition of 2,500 a year per student. My classmates are now doctors, nurses, and couple of graphic designers. One even was offered several 4 year scholorships based on his math abilities.
Maybe the issue is family life? Parents who take the time to find a good solution for education are more involved? Who knows, but the point is it DOESNT have to cost more.
I did study mathematics in US and Russia and I can compare the qualtity of education. It seems that teachers in Russia (and probably the rest of europe) emphasize the understanding the underlying concepts of mathematical theories rather than methods of solving a particular problem. The american students were expecting that the problmes given on the exam are exactly the same that were covered in class, and were always complaining when the professor made even trivial changes in the problems. It could've been the quailty of the students in my particular university, but now I am working at the major government research organization and we get a lot of students coming for the internship in the summer, and it seems that people from europe are much better at solving problems that they never seen before. In these days ability to solve a known problems has almost zero value because it is something that could be done by a simple shell script. Although, sometimes I see US students who are very good at mathematics, those studends usually come from the better schools like MIT and Rice, but they tend to be self taught and usually say that they pretty much skip most of their classses regarding them as the complete waste of time, and I can't say that I disagree with that. This applies
That's easier said than done. Telling a child "you'll need this if you grow up to be a physicist or an accountant" will just get you "BUT IM GOING TO BE A BASKETBALL PLAYER IN THE NBA."
Accountability should be held on the parents, they should force their children to learn for their own good. Blame decreasing accountability on parents for decreasing academic excellence, don't blame the teachers. While there are a few bad teachers, there are a lot more good teachers.
Really ? A country where a large percentage of the voting populace believes the world is 6000 years old is performing poorly in an educational evaluation ? Shocking.
A very large portion of Americans don't see value in any education at all. They figure out a way to make money, and spend the rest of their time engaged in watching mindless entertainment. Personally, I see that as a problem. Obviously, the vast majority of Americans that live this way don't really see it as much of an issue.
I agree, there needs to be more emphasis on education in general in our culture. Unfortunately, changing the culture to favor something that requires more brain power and effort from the average citizen is easier said than done.
Blame decreasing accountability on parents for decreasing academic excellence, don't blame the teachers.
And I suppose we should never blame the school system which soaks up 80% of the kids time and energy but offers little of interest to anyone but the least common denominator...
Ya, kids are really going to spend 6-7 hours a day sitting in class "learning" nothing, then come home and spend 2-3 hours actually studying something new and interesting. Some might, but that's the minority.
If you look at the graph on page 94 (page 92 of the PDF) what seems to be happening is that most of the First and Second World countries perform roughly the same. There is a sharp dropoff after Portugal or Italy, where you start seeing more significant movement downards with each successive country.
I'd be curious to see what this would look like if you excluded immigrants - I suspect the US would place a lot higher relative to highly homogenous societies like the ones at the top.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
The purpose of any education system is to provide the opportunity to learn to those who _want_ to learn. I'd rather have an education system that puts out a few brilliant people a year than the one that's good "on average" but doesn't put out any geniuses.
When I was in high school (and this wasn't in the US), about 80% of the class didn't give a fuck about learning. They've completed their mandatory nine year courses and left the school. About a half of those who stayed really did care about their future and studied really hard for the last two years at least. This allowed them (including yours truly) to enter all kinds of schools in the country, and some of them (including yours truly) graduated with honors from them.
Did this education system succeed? I think it did. Would the average results look good? I think they would not.
Let's face it, you don't need math to flip hamburgers or to do plumbing work. Heck, many programmers in the company where I work are puzzled by the most trivial math formulae. Despite of this they do their jobs fairly well.
I'm not saying that good education is not essential for those who want to achieve things in life (even though "american dream" proves time after time, that you don't have to have any education to make a shitload of money). To the contrary, I feel that people who don't have good education miss out on a lot of things in life.
I think I've had teachers who were actually offended when a student asked how practical the course material was.
I think standardized testing is an important tool in improving education, along with individual follow-up.
Irene KHAAAAAAN!
An object at rest tends to stay at rest. Yes -- Humanity, on the whole, tends to the paths of least resistance.
Look beyond that generalization and consider how part of the culture of America is how uncool school is. From stories of our heroes, Presidents and CEOs who dropped out of high school, to the glamorization of the 'cool' kids who cut class we have created the impression that shunning public education as the hip way to start being successful.
We've all sung along to lyrics like "We don't need no Education!" and "School's out for ever!" We've all rooted for Ferris Beuler, the Breakfast Club, and the kids from Saved by the Bell to outwit their bumbling teachers and principals and cut class in the most extreme ways possible. But it's songs and movies like this that has turned education into Enemy #1 for our youth.
If America is to do better academic-wise, it has to do more than just pour money down the public school drain. It has to change the image of education in our culture as something to be respected and appreciated as a necessity and not just an option. For every successful highschool dropout there are a thousand on food stamps and public welfare. For every professional athlete earning millions in the big leauge, there are a hundred thousand earning minimum wage.
Until we impress on young minds the fact that cool or uncool makes no difference when you're grown and penniless these facts will never change. If people want to talk about how the Rich Minority are taking over the country, just look at the uneducated majority and understand why. Sometimes it's not a conspiracy -- sometimes, it's just logic.
The conservatives screw up the schools because educated people want more money for their labor. They also like to tell you things like "your poor circumstances are because you are LAZY".
And then you come along, and the first thing out of your mouth is "we are lazy." In other words, the conservatives *love* to moralize because it distracts us from the plan to keep labor cheap, and you rationalize that you're poor because you are immoral. Swallowed hook, line, and sinker.
And I don't need any more proof of that than the first words out of your mouth. "We are lazy".
1) Conservatives push moral issues. If you are moral, everything will be good, the argument goes.
2) Conservatives really want cheap labor, so they screw up the schools. EVERY attack on universal education in the US is coming from the conservatives.
3) So, they will screw up our schools with their funding cuts, their evolution attacks, their denigration.
4) The poor education will make us and keep us poor, cheap laborers. The rich get richer on their great educations (GW Bush, Yale '68)
5) And the reason for our poverty? Go right back to #1 - you rabble are lazy, and it's all your fault.
Don't take what they are pushing. The cheap labor conservatives want to keep you poor, because you cost too much money. They have to go all the way to India to save money now, but they'd rather give you your old job back at a quarter the salary, with no health benefits.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
I agree.
Not that people are lazy, that's as profound as saying people are selfish (though accurate).
The problem with this county is that it sees education as elitist. You know the old Hollywood stereotype. Evil genius gets the crap beat out of him by buff super guy using big guns.
We have fox news with o Riley calling Yale alumni pinheads. It's fucking Yale, YALE. Hell, we have fox news, which alone says enough about our problems.
Even on Slashdot we get into these regular retarded arguments about how your code is more important then your college degree. Never mind the good it does for society to have another person that can think outside of their narrow scope. It's this attitude that's the real problem.
Only 27 % if Americans (over 25) have earned college degree in 2002. Is that higher then the past years? Sure. But damn it, we are the richest Country in the word, but more then 2/3 of the people only have (at best) a high school education? That's fucking ridiculous.
Seriously, majority rule and the majority have the education of chimp on tequila binge?
Not cool.
There's a problem with test methodology here.
One problem is how we count money. $1 in the US is not $1 in the Czech republic. You can get a very nice meal at a restaurant in the Czech republic for under $5 (US) (groceries/rent/etc are much cheaper as well). Trickle this down, and the Czech republic can afford to pay their teachers much less while maintaining a better standard of living than US teachers.
Another issue: it's mandatory for everyone in the US to go to school. Everyone. In other countries, it's voluntary or not strictly enforced. Because it's mandatory, not all parents really care about their kids performance. My mom read to me since I was born, and I learned math skills at home before I ever went to school. I don't think it's purely coincidental I managed a 650 in math on the SATs while going to public schools my entire life.
Lastly, immigrants. The majority come from poorer countries. The proble is that kids who never went to school in Haiti, come over to the US and take this test, aren't going to do so hot. In addition to not having an education, malnourishment is a problem in many poorer counties. Early malnourishment has been scientifically shown to have a stifling and sometimes permanent effect on intellectual capacity.
I like the use of empirical methodology to measure these things, but we have to study the data a bit more thoroughly before making conclusions (even radical things like spending more money on foreign aid to the world's poorest countries instead of more nuclear subs we're never going to use).
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
This is a total bullshit. Czech Republic for instance has a compulsory education for all childern since Maria Terezia made that law way back in 18th century. At that time half of US kids were still educated only as the farm duties allowed. Stop making excuses, start listening in school.
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
Well, for one, we can ignore calls that "intelligent design" be taught in science in place of evolution. When you have states like Kanses, Georgia, etc, in this country saying they should be taught as equally likely theories in science classes... we are doomed.
I have seen this statement before and I'm not too particularly fond of it. Is it supposed to be an elitist statement? Sure sounds like it. Is it supposed to be demeaning, as if your problems don't matter? Could be intepreted that way. If someone keeps seeing this in their math education, how are they supposed to be motivated to do well if people think their problems are worthless? Or, how are they supposed to be motivated to continue if they are always being ensured that they will keep encountering more and more crap?
And a high suicide rate, IIRC
I'd be curious to see what this would look like if you excluded immigrants - I suspect the US would place a lot higher relative to highly homogenous societies like the ones at the top.
Yeah, it's all those damn immigrants from Finland, China, Korea, and Japan bringing our scores down! If people from those countries were better at math, our score would be higher!
U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A!
I suspect the US would place a lot higher relative to highly homogenous societies like the ones at the top.
Yes, because Canada (one of the countries at the top) is so "highly homogenous", right?
In this case We=NEA. The US spends more damn time and money on useless multicultural, politically correct, make-the-student-feel-good-about-themselves bullshit, not to mention the blatant lowering of standards in order to make sure group X graduates at the same rate as group Y. This has been going on since the late 60s in the major metro areas and has spread. IMHO, the school system should just wake up and realize that some kids are too damn stupid to handle high school education and should put them in vocational trade schools or prison, whichever is more appropriate.
It's up to the parents.
Only the parents can change the outcome.
It is the parent's choice whether to take an active role in their children's education or to abandon them to someone paid by the state to perform that service.
[How many careers actually use higher-end math at work?] More than use knowledge of Civil War battles or the digestive system of an earthworm or most of the other things that are taught in school.
A lot of that is supposedly to make us more-informed voters on things such as wars and pollution standards, not necessarily get bigger paychecks. Whether it helps or not is debatable. There is not a lot of research for how early-year school affects decision making 30+ years down the road. Thus, what we have left are tons of pet theories and Holy Wars about what should be taught.
Table-ized A.I.
Fool!
You're assuming space is Euclidian! What if the wall is rotating at 80% of the speed of light in relation to you?
Go back to school, "geekoid".
Seriously though, that's one of those things that sounds tricky but is obvious in retrospect, although technically you'd need some way to measure a right angle.
I was turned on to math by my engineer Dad. One of the first things that blew my mind about how cool numbers were was the idea of logarithms. In sixth grade I computed the prime numbers up to 1000 for an extra credit project and in doing so realized I only had to check prime factors up to the square root of the number I was checking.
Math normally becomes interesting when it's applied to do useful and interesting stuff, although some freaks like me are attracted to numbers for the sheer beauty and coolness of them.
Some people point to a sunset or a mountain as evidence that there must be a God. Me? I point to Number Theory. Anyone can heap up rocks or make a planet orbit, but to me, it takes an Omnipotent Creator to achieve the infinite and sublime beauty of numbers.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
IMHO, no more than 10% to 15% of jobs probably require a college education. It's just that the quality of education up through H.S. in the U.S. hass, for the most part, deteriorated to a large degree. Running a small retail establishment, construction, trades, most manufacturing jobs, telemarketing, sales, many first level management, all these should not require a college degree. They didn't in the past. So with 27% of Americans getting degrees, that's twice as many as what's really needed.
Parents are THE most important factor in a child's success in school and life in general. My parents expected a lot from me and I delivered. I expect a lot from my children and they deliver too. They understand the importance of education to their future. They understand respect for others and the meaning of responsibility. It is not the school's job to do what parent's don't do.
Self awareness - try it!
The engineers from outside the US were able to do the job. Only the top notch products of the US school system could cope.
The top-notch products of the US school system hired you to do the work while they rob the company. Sucker.
paintball
I got quite excited by the rap culture and other by gone black artists. When I drilled my black school mate about the subject, he was put off by it and told me that I'm applying a stereo type to him, and he propably was right. He was into science, literature etc. and quite good at them if I remember right. It made me think the whole subject in a new way.
The number of athletes and artists the black community springs forth is amazing. This success, while source of pride to many, might be counter productive to the aspiring scientist of the future, because role models in those fields are invisible hidden in the blaze of the entertainment stars. And number of stars is actually quite small when compared to number of laywers, doctors and engineers.
All cultures have a set of patterns that young people mimic to succeed as adults, here in Finland many dream of a NHL career for their kid and at expense of school work drag their kids to ice morning and night. So often these patterns can be counter productive to the general population. If the tradition in the family is to work at the local mill and TV shows glittering path to fame and glory, many will not think of the third path. My wife who came from blue collar background, would propably never have done a PhD if she hadn't met me and been introduced to circles where practically everybody had a PhD. On this I might be wrong of course...
I'd be curious to see what this would look like if you excluded immigrants - I suspect the US would place a lot higher relative to highly homogenous societies like the ones at the top.
I would imagine that excluding inner city ghettoes would also have a marked effect on the numbers. But what are you going to do then? Declare East St. Louis a foreign country and bomb it? Good, bad, or indifferent, they are part of us. The only thing that this sort of number crunching is really good for is identifying areas that need more attention.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
A theory is not a theory because it has been proven to "every inch forward and backward". (It would be a fact then).
Rather, what makes a theory is that it is possible to falsify it. A fantasy like the creationist garbage can not be falsified because it relies on fantastic assumptions. It is therefore definitely not a theory.
A society where both parents have to work at least 1 job each creates a society of kids lacking the attention they need to grow as human beings. Pure economic theory is no more a good way to run the world than pure marxism.
Does a Christian soccer team even need a goalkeeper?
Actually, I beleive the offshoring trend has illustrated that learning things like "divergence and the surface integral of a vector field" entitle you to a less-than-minimum-wage (for the US) job in a third-world country. That is, after all, the value that employers appear to be putting on such knowledge. What's the point? We can do better studying french-fry making.
This is exactly the problem.
15-year-olds may be immature, but they're old enough to see what's going on around them and have a basic understanding of society. They can see that engineers and physicists don't have a glamorous life, or even an employed one in many cases, while all their rich friends' parents are all lawyers and businesspeople.
With a society that places the most value on screwing people out of their money, rather than creating new things, why would anyone expect the children of this society to have any interest at all in math and science? You don't need these things to succeed in business or law. Heck, with the current economy, realty is a very rewarding profession, and you don't need to know anything at all to do that--most realtors couldn't even change the locks on a house if they had to!
Honestly, I'm surprised we did as well as we did in this math skills survey.
A growing (but now recognized as problematic) movement over the past few years has been the introduction of the "Investigations" math curriculum into public schools. see here. The goal is to make kids "feel better" about learning math, which in many ways has been a code for dumbing down the curriculum so that academic rigor is out and poorer students can achieve better on tests. They learn by approximating answers, like 12x48 will approximately be like 10x50. In my opinion, this is the opposite of math -- where the goal is to find the one *correct* answer.
In this curriculum, the kids learn by discovering the rules of math on their own, but this is absolutely ridiculous -- the whole point of passing knowledge through civilization is that we don't have to relearn like cavemen from birth. They spend time playing with blocks to count numbers, all the way up to 4th grade. These children are going to be severely hurt. Part of the problem is that teaching math at home has failed many of them, plus the teachers aren't qualified to teach math, so they grasp any curriculum that seems to make the subject more "fun" at the expense of real learning. An annoying part of the curriculum is that it also inserts a very touchy-feely agenda into the textbooks, and while I'm quite liberal about educating kids on history, etc., this has no useful place in math class.
Also, some people suspect that the test scores are rising because we're dumbing down the tests themselves -- which is outrageous. See here for example.
You may not think that these questions affect you, but they do. When we have a large fraction of the population unable to do basic math, we all will suffer. From things like being unable to hire competent workers, to the person serving you at a restaurant or a store unable to compute change, to your kid having access to only the most basic math education because the rest of the kids are so far behind they have to be specially taught, taking away resources for the higher achievers...(part of the No Child Left Behind = No Gifted Child Gets Ahead program) read this report on how gifted children are done given the shaft in the US..
I wonder why He made Number Theory incomplete...
What does being a Yale alumnus have to do with being smart?
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
I'd be curious to see what this would look like if you excluded immigrants - I suspect the US would place a lot higher relative to highly homogenous societies like the ones at the top.
You are aware all white people in the US are immigrants? So the US statistic would consist entirely of Native Americans and Inuit? And the mods find you insightful? Either your white and racist or just an idiot.
WTF??
Creating new things is what makes a society worth having, or historically worth studying. Ancient societies that created great works of art and literature are remembered now, thousands of years later, and these works are still remembered and studied.
Notice that when I said "creating new things", I didn't specify only technological works. The fact that you've assumed this shows that you have some sort of agenda to push.
As for realtors, it sounds like I may have touched a nerve. I'm sorry, but almost all the realtors I've met are complete morons who are nearly incapable of keeping themselves afloat financially. I only used the lock thing as an analogy; maybe I should have said something like "I'm surprised most realtors have enough sense to drive a vehicle to the house they're selling." There's a test to be passed to get a driver's license too, but look how poor most drivers are.
Not all realtors are morons; my last realtor that I bought my house through was excellent. He not only knew all the business stuff, but also came over after I moved in and helped fix a few minor issues in my attic that the inspector had noted.
there is more to life than technology. I feel the US is so completely entrenched in technology for technology's sake that we are doomed. Life itself has become a commodity in service of new technology. Ask anyone today if they would sacrifice a (anonymous) human life for some grand new technology. The answer will be a definite "yes."
WTF? You're talking about the USA, right? The country where kids' math skills are on par with those of Afghanistan, and a majority of the population thinks the earth is 6000 years old? The one where all the engineering jobs are being sent to India?
The US is not a uber-technological country. You're thinking of Japan or maybe Germany. The US is two things: a land where people are extremely greedy and lazy, and will screw over anyone for a buck, and a land where religious zealots run amok.
You really need to get out some.
The purpose of any education system is to provide the opportunity to learn to those who _want_ to learn. I'd rather have an education system that puts out a few brilliant people a year than the one that's good "on average" but doesn't put out any geniuses.
You've just outlined precisely the attitude that spells out why the U.S. is languishing in maths, and countries like Australia (where I teach) are doing quite well. The purpose of any education system is most certainly not to churn out 'a few geniuses', leaving everyone else to languish in uneducated stupor. Societies composed of the majority being of acceptable skill are far more productive and desirable than the scenario you describe. The occasional exceptionally gifted individual is certainly desirable, but we should not exaggerate their overall usefulness to society to demigodlike proportions.
Also, as adults, we recognise the value of learning. Children, unsuprisingly due to their limited life experience, may not immediately recognise this value (i.e. they may not 'want' to learn). It is our role as parents and educators to motivate and instill a love of learning consistently throughout schooling, and provide learning experiences that are enjoyable and likely to encourage students of the value of lifelong learning.
The scenario of giving up on every student who doesn't display orgasmic joy at the thought of doing algebra condemns a society to mediocrity - so given your nation's current maths education status, it seems that many of your countrymen agree with your philosophy.
Let's face it, you don't need math to flip hamburgers or to do plumbing work. Heck, many programmers in the company where I work are puzzled by the most trivial math formulae. Despite of this they do their jobs fairly well.
Yes, you do - you need maths for all of that stuff, and you use it too. Jeez, even a burger-flipper needs to be able to count how many burgers he's flipping, and how many patties he needs to make X burgers. Plumbers use maths constantly - do you think pipes just miraculously appear at the correct size? Plumbers are highly skilled professionals, and they and other trades are too frequently disdained by those of us with a University education - the amount of knowledge they need and apply daily is considerable. There are also a lot fewer unemployed plumbers than computer programmers around ATM, so maybe that's telling you something too? Who contributes more to the society in which they live - these maths 'geniuses', or the plumbers whose level of knowledge you scorn?
The thing with this kind of math usage is that since people do it 'without feeling it', people who don't know better assume that no mathematics usage is taking place. In fact, frequently, this is precisely the way that most maths in put into practice on a daily basis, but somehow this kind of arithmetic is viewed as unworthy because it doesn't involve formulae and 'higher maths'.
99% of the maths that people do in their daily lives falls into the categories you have just described as 'mathsless'.
SofaMan -- Occasionally Battling Evil With His Mighty Powers Of Indolence.
In fact, though, this is the irony of the annual "American Children Falling Behind in math!" freakout -- the stories are always phrased in terms of "The US placed xth out of y countries!" with no notion of error bars, relative size of margins or any other of the statistical basics that are necessary to make the slightest sense of the results.
There is one statistical measure that gives it credence, however:
Repeatability.
The fact is, we're never in the top 20. This has been seen in study after study after study, each conducted by a different group. Don't you think, that after the nth time, we should come to realize that maybe -- just maybe -- we really aren't in the top 20, as opposed to living in denial from lack of error bars?
- sm