Editorial: Losing at the numbers game

Test your own maths skills here

Scarcely a month goes by without an outbreak of handwringing from some agency or lobby group about declining standards in education. Concern and consternation that boys are lagging behind girls can erupt without warning, and it's hard to hear the voices of those who point out that it is social class (read ethnicity) rather than gender at work: it's not boys, but poor, brown boys who are doing badly.

Yet the pronouncement this week by a maths lecturer from the University of Auckland that two thirds of children arriving at secondary school lack basic numeracy skills is different from the other, more run-of-the-mill doomsaying, because it is the assessment of someone who knows what he is talking about. Peter Hughes, the principal lecturer in mathematics at the university's faculty of education - he's in the part of that faculty that used to be called "teachers' college" - is highly regarded in teaching circles. And working, as he does, at the coalface of education, he knows that the roots of the question are deep.

Education authorities are given to dismissing concerns about our childrens' shortcomings in numeracy by pointing to international data that put New Zealand's primary and secondary school mathematics achievement at a level above the OECD average. But should we be happy to settle for being above average, an achievement level that is typically accompanied on a school report with the annotation "must try harder" or "room for improvement"?

In any case it misses the point: if standards are falling throughout the OECD, we can maintain our above-average position in international league while our actual achievement slips remorselessly backwards.

It is of interest that Hughes traces at least part of the problem back to the much-criticised NCEA which slices and dices educational attainment into discrete chunks that can be achieved without any actual understanding taking place: students can gain numeracy credits for NCEA level one, he explains, by doing trigonometry, algebra or geometry - performing calculations as though they are mathematical games by learning to apply rules, without necessarily demonstrating that they understand the underlying mathematics. There is, he remarks pungently, "an underpinning cancer of number".

There is more at stake here than a few grades on a school report. In the public imagination, illiteracy quite properly ranks alongside tuberculosis or child poverty as an indicator of a society that is failing to deliver to its citizens: innumeracy does not have quite the same forbidding ring to it, in part, as Hughes explains, because New Zealanders have often taken a perverse pride in being "useless at maths".

But a poor command of numeracy is a basic ingredient of social disadvantage. Figures released this week by the Young Enterprise Trust showed that an alarming number of students leave secondary school without an understanding of basic financial concepts. Only eight of 40 questions were answered correctly by more than half of a sample of 443 students. They would presumably not know that if you make the minimum monthly payment on a $1000 credit card balance, it will take you almost 10 years to clear the debt - and you'll pay more than $2000 all told.

The sad fact is that those children's' parents probably wouldn't have fared much better in the test. The suggestion that failed finance companies would not have had as many investors as they did if the victims had been more numerate may be stretching it a bit; naivety, if not myopic greed, drove some to invest in improbable schemes that were paying only a percentage point or two above bank rates. But it is true that a population lacking numerical facility is a population denied a basic human right. We could all help by starting to see maths as cool, rather than geeky, and communicating that to our children. And we should keep insisting that our schools come up with a cure for that cancer of number.