Conrad Wolfram Visits Messy Times to Discuss Improving Math Education

Wolfram Research will be familiar to many people for their advanced computation tools. Separately, in the public policy arena, Conrad Wolfram has founded https://computerbasedmath.organd written a book, The Maths Fix, all part of an effort to improve how we teach mathematics in our schools. If you are one of the people who find or found mathematics a challenging subject in school and are looking for improved ways of teaching this critical subject so that more people gain the practical skills for computational confidence, have a listen and take this discussion as a call to action. In schools, far too much emphasis is placed on the mechanics of math - working problems manually with pen and paper - rather than leaving the boring mechanics to computers, as we do in the real world. The conceptual, problem-solving abstraction is what children need to learn, not the mechanics. Engineers don't use slide rules anymore; why are we bashing kids with testing emphasizing speed of worked calculations? What does that have to do with preparing them for real life?

We at Messy Times have long clamored for mathematical fluency in society, if only for improved civic health. Politicians love nothing more than an ignorant population. On a practical level, the last two years of insane, irrational treatment of formerly free people would have experienced far greater pushback had more people possessed a firmer grasp of statistics and probability. Focusing on the positive, campaigns for computational skills echo the campaigns for universal literacy in the early 19th century. As pure manual labor began to require advanced knowledge, it was no longer sufficient to swing an axe or a shovel - all levels of society required the basic ability to read and the advanced abilities to reason. Similarly, for people to succeed in today's economic and social advances, they require a broad-based computational "literacy." Current primary and secondary math curricula are failing to deliver that literacy, but working together, we can change that system to deliver better results for kids.

Much as there were critics in the 1800s who laughed at the idea of universal literacy, there are those whose outdated idea of what constitutes "teaching math" restricts them from understanding that most of society can learn mathematical thinking in the context of using computers to do the mechanics of computation. One needn't know how to perform rigorous mathematical proofs to use a computer or manage an automated factory line.