Published on Psychology Today (http://www.psychologytoday.com)
By Peter Gray
Created Apr 15 2010 - 6:06am
We fear it and loathe it; we admire but are also suspicious of those who are good at it; we place it in such high esteem that we make children study (or pretend to study) it almost every day of every year that they are in school; and we use it as a major criterion for college entry. We put math on a pedestal and then we avert our eyes, or else we spit at it--as happens with most things that we put on pedestals.
Math is that school subject that we can't BS our way through. That's one thing that makes it so scary to so many. There are right and wrong answers to every question, no partial credit. It also seems to many people that math performance reflects basic intelligence. To do badly is to come across as logically inept, so fear of failure is even greater in math than in other school subjects, and fear of failure always inhibits learning. I suppose the reason math counts so much on the SAT and ACT college admissions tests is that people think it is an index of general reasoning ability. But they are wrong.
The first step in coming to grips with math is to knock it off its pedestal. The real-life problems that are important to us are problems like these: Whom should I marry? Should I marry? Should gays be allowed to marry? What career should I go into and how should I prepare for it? If I invent gizmo X, will people buy it? Should corporations have the same constitutional rights as individuals? What's the best way to unplug the toilet? Math plays little if any role in solving such problems, nor do such problems have clear-cut right or wrong answers, demonstrable by some formula. Human intelligence and reasoning reside in wisdom, not math. Wisdom is the ability to bring one's values, likes and dislikes, knowledge about other people and their likes and dislikes, and general knowledge of the world together in a manner that leads to workable solutions to the problems that confront us--solutions that promote our own and others' happiness and decrease our own and others' miseries. Math has its purposes, indeed it has some valuable purposes in our modern world, but it is far from the core of intelligence. Humans were intelligent long before math was invented. Some of the smartest people I know--even some of the best scientists I know--are not particularly good at math.
The second step in coming to grips with math is to realize that math is not particularly difficult. There is nothing magical about it. You do not need some natural gift beyond that of a normal human brain to do it. Nor does it require the thousands of hours of study that we try to force upon school children. In fact, those thousands of hours of forced work at math, done for a grade and not for fun or for any practical use, are what make math seem so difficult and intimidating.
Read the full article, with many anecdotal examples of math success, here.