Nearly two decades ago my youngest daughter was at primary school when her mother and I became concerned with her having difficulty with arithmetic. She did not appear to know or be taught either her tables or simple long division. We went to see the Headmistress.
We were told over coffee that our ideas were ‘old fashioned’ and now maths were being taught with a ‘new method’ called ‘new maths’ which was concerned with the ‘philosophy of number’. We blinked. We thanked her and left. Her mother said in the car that what she had heard was nonsense and she would herself teach our daughter all the basics she needed to know including her tables. At school the child became something of a star among her peers and was described by her maths teacher (new maths of course) as ‘a gifted mathematician’.
The chickens of this barmy experiment, driven by crackpot academics unable to tell folly from wisdom, are now coming home to roost. In a frightening report the Lords Science and Technology Committee highlights the shocking deficiency in mathematical skills even among the brightest students arriving at the best universities. Indeed we lag behind every other country in Europe.
This is the pickle into which the drivel about ‘new maths’ has got us. It is a monstrous failure of duty to the young and gifted. It will have a serious economic impact on our nation until it is put right. Maths is maths. It is neither new nor old. It is timeless. It is time it was taught properly again from the earliest age in all our schools.