The arts, sport, acquisition of complex life skills: all must be sacrificed on the altar of the easily measurable, says Guardian columnist Simon Jenkins
. She declared Britain faced “economic decline” if it failed to copy China and didn’t get better at maths. Here, at least, Sunak agrees with her.
This led to the slow death of extracurricular education – the number of playing fields halved – while parents were ordered “to devote 20 minutes to bedtime stories”. Baker’s school reforms were dubbed by the Modern Law Review, “the high point of elective dictatorship”. Everyone would agree that children must be taught to handle numbers, and that some professions need special skills, scientific, linguistic and numerical. But that the nation’s economic survival might rest on a universal teenage mastery of complex and abstract concepts soon forgotten is utterly absurd.
Like many of my generation, I did basic and advanced maths to age 16. This embraced complex algebra, trigonometry, quadratic equations, differential calculus, the use of logarithms and old-fashioned slide rules. I cannot recall ever using one jot of it, all now forgotten. Nor can anyone I have asked from a reasonably wide circle. It was a waste of time, while I was taught no geography and little history.
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