Why you should learn algebra
Those who complain about its
impracticality ignore that math teaches the mind how to think.
By David Eggenschwiler
David Eggenschwiler is an English
professor emeritus at USC.
EVERY YEAR, as many California high
school seniors struggle with basic algebra, which is required for
graduation, Times readers complain, "Who needs it? How many
students will ever use it?" Well, I use it every day; I'm using it
now, even though I haven't worked an algebraic equation since my
son was in the seventh grade several years ago.
Mathematics and science are unnatural practices. As physics
professor Alan Cromer has brutally and elegantly written, "the
human mind wasn't designed to study physics," and of course
mathematics is the language of physics. "Design" here does not
indicate an intelligent designer, which would suggest a creator
with a math phobia. Rather it indicates evolutionary processes by
which the human brain and mind have come to be what they are.
During the approximately 2 million years that it took for our
Homo forebears to progress from habilis to sapiens,
they had little use for mathematical reasoning abilities. Their
sapientia seems to have been more suited in a good Darwinian
sense to the immediate demands of their survival, such as eating,
mating and avoiding premature death. Whether for good or ill, as
time may tell, our situations have changed much in the last few
thousand years, and so have demands on our poor, lagging minds. I
don't mean only the obvious and oft-repeated claim that technical
jobs require greater skills. That is clear enough in auto
mechanics and computer programming. I mean the need to think
abstractly, systematically and rationally in various ways.
Science and mathematics have the most exacting demands for such
thinking, but there are many other disciplines that require it.
Even the practices of critical reading and writing that I teach
are soft but still demanding forms of rationality, and I
occasionally fear that the human mind was not designed to study
them either.
Fortunately, however, the mind can be altered; the brain can learn
to function in different ways. We can even, if pushed hard enough,
learn to think in what physicist Lewis Wolpert has called "the
unnatural nature of science." Because our minds are not greatly
civilized into reason (as political speeches show), we need some
hard instruction to learn to do what we do not do naturally, and
as the ancient Greeks discovered, mathematics is a fine
schoolmaster (or mistress) for that purpose. In most scholastic
and academic disciplines, what you learn to think about is not as
important as how you learn to think.
I encourage my college honor students to think in odd, even
deviant ways, but I couldn't do that if they had not already
learned how to think abstractly and systematically. They have
taken their algebra and physics and are ready to think still
differently, even while becoming creative writers and musicians.
One of the most brilliantly wacky English professors I know once
studied engineering. I was going to be a physicist before I was
seduced into the pleasant valleys of the social sciences and
humanities.
So let us not hear repeatedly that high school algebra is a waste
of time because it does not directly train students for the job
market. Even in a vocational program, it teaches the mind how to
think. In some cases it might even teach students to think about
the universe, which is a very nice way to spend one's life.
Let us instead ask the harder
question: How can we better prepare students to study algebra? It
would surely not be easy, but it is worth doing.
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