PLATFORM : Why Brag About It?

It’s socially acceptable in this country to be mathematically illiterate. Nobody would brag about the fact that they can’t read. But everybody brags about the fact that they didn’t like math, they don’t know how to do math, and that they hate it and they avoid it.

There’s a problem of not enough people interested in teaching math. And there’s a problem of those teaching mathematics. There’re a lot of good math teachers out there, but there’s also a lot of poor mathematics that’s being taught.

It used to be that it was nice to know math. Now it’s an economic necessity. The jobs require the skills that are taught in mathematics--the thinking, the problem solving techniques. The National Academy of Science says that of the 21 million new jobs in the year 2000, 75% of them are going to require some post-secondary education, including math. And we can’t even get 50% of our students through high-school math, which leads to college mathematics.