There is widespread alarm in the United States about the state of our math education, writes Sol Garfunkel and David Mumford at the New York Times.

Sol Garfunkel is the executive director of the Consortium for Mathematics and Its Applications. David Mumford is an emeritus professor of mathematics at Brown.

The anxiety, the writers say, can be traced to the poor performance of American students on various international tests, and it is now embodied in George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind law, which requires public school students to pass standardized math tests by the year 2014 and punishes their schools or their teachers if they do not.

“All this worry is based on the assumption that there is a single established body of mathematical skills that everyone needs to know to be prepared for 21st-century careers. This assumption is wrong. The truth is that different sets of math skills are useful for different careers, and our math education should be changed to reflect this fact.”

They believe that American high schools’ highly abstract curriculum is simply not the best way to prepare a vast majority of high school students for life. A math curriculum that focused on real-life problems would still expose students to the abstract tools of mathematics, they claim.

“There is a world of difference between teaching “pure” math, with no context, and teaching relevant problems that will lead students to appreciate how a mathematical formula models and clarifies real-world situations.”

They dismiss the ‘traditionalist’ argument that there is a value in abstract reasoning:

“A generation ago, traditionalists were also arguing that studying Latin, though it had no practical application, helped students develop unique linguistic skills. We believe that studying applied math, like learning living languages, provides both useable knowledge and abstract skills.”

They say that we now have a real choice. “The traditional high school math sequence is not the only road to mathematical competence.”

They believe that the best way for the United States to compete globally is to strive for universal quantitative literacy: teaching topics that make sense to all students and can be used by them throughout their lives.

“It is through real-life applications that mathematics emerged in the past, has flourished for centuries and connects to our culture now.”

Tim at Assorted Stuff agreed with a lot what the academics said, though warned us “don’t count on anything changing anytime soon.”

“While learning math through modeling and making connections is exactly what students need, these instructional techniques don’t align at all with our one-size-fits-all, standardized, easy-to-test education policy.”