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Comment by tempodox | Hacker News Reader

> …forcing children to spend years learning longhand sums that can be easily done by computers.

If we don't teach this, we'll forget how we got computers to do arithmetic in the first place. Not teaching basic arithmetic skills would be unconscionable.

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If longhand sums take years to learn we are doing it wrong and/or doing it at the wrong stage.

Laying foundations (counting, numerals) will take years sure, but they will be useful over various domains, but specific techniques shouldn’t be drilled. They are simple enough to pick up once matured a bit.

Like someone said, why calculate sin(x) when you can use a lookup table. I mean, sure, do it a few times when you are ready to appreciate it but forcing it down young kids’s their throats for years on end is detrimental.

Whilst I agree, you're reading too much into the article. The article says more about the standard of journalism in FT than anything based in reality.

Look at who wrote it:

https://www.ft.com/madhumita-murgia

https://www.ft.com/bethan-staton

Do you think either of these people have an innate understanding of the education system and its syllabus? They're journos. One of which is their dedicated AI hot take specialist.

It's a throwaway piece that's a vehicle for ads.

The better part is calling it 'forcing'. As a young kid I used to enjoy long operation on paper (sum/mul/sqrt), no one forced me. The process helps understands the basic principles

Do we really believe it's a good idea to make a case for people being even less mathematically inclined than they already are?

I don't.

Personally, being forced into some specifics topics only made me less inclined to put any effort or have interest in them.

Some people have an innate interest in some topics. Some don’t. Some that don’t can develop one if properly prompted at different times in different ways. Others never will.

I fail to see how forcing anyone is supposed to help. It’s only a symptom of an earlier failure.

I for one am glad that some preferred playing the piano, and were given the freedom to, to solving n-degree polynomial equations. Because I sure can’t be bothered to learn to play, and I definitely like listening to some of them.

Why do you think giving people more choices would lead to people being less mathematically inclined? I think the opposite might happen.

It is not impossible that our current system is making people less mathematically inclined than a different system.

The narrative when this comes up always seems to be about defending the current system as if everything is going so great as is.

In the piano analogy mentioned, it does feel like we spend time drilling scales and tuning the piano at the expense of the average appreciation for music. A good system for producing a small amount of future piano virtuoso while most end up not wanting anything to do with music at all.

Your comment very much reminds me of the Isaac Asimov story "The Feeling of Power" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feeling_of_Power). I think it might be worth the time read or, in my case, re-read it.

Not to mention it's useful.

You have so many decisions to make that need you to evaluate how much is something: shopping, working, cooking, driving, voting, reading the news... If you have to get your phone out of your pocket every time you need to decide something, this gets you out of the flow.

We don't teach children how to make fire with sticks, and most of us probably couldn't do it either. We, as a culture, literally forgot the first step that enabled all our industry. Is that a problem?

Sure we do. In the Boy Scouts for example, though I just learned it from a book. I suspect a large percentage of people on HN would know how to start a fire from scratch.

> I suspect a large percentage of people on HN would know how to start a fire from scratch.

It's almost impossible for me to believe that even 1% of HN readers can start a friction fire.

Would it really be only 1% of kids who join the Boy Scouts, or Girl Guides, or Boys Brigade (or whatever your country's equivalents are)? I would have guessed it was much higher than that.

And then you'd have people who learned in some outdoor survival course, etc. Obviously this will vary from country to country, but surely it's higher than 1%?

Friction fires aren't necessarily always the easiest way to start a fire, if you have any common metal, lens or reflective surface to hand there are way easier techniques

Current readers. But the core readership from say 15 years ago?

Do you think that our society only remembers the skills that we teach children to be able to do with a pen and paper?

More concretely, we already just teach kids that the trigonometric functions are essentially black boxes, you can just look up sin(x) in a table, someone has calculated it already. It doesn't mean we've "forgotten" how to calculate sin.

I think this indicates a bigger problem, we still of math as arithmetic, especially in education. Arithmetic should be viewed as a specialised branch of math, something only learned in depth if you have skills, interest and aptitude. We should focus more on introducing kids to the full breadth of mathematics superficially and then letting them explore and expand their understanding and skills from there.

And the modern world is full of those kind of black boxes that only a small proportion will ever understand. And it is a necessity because that is how we build on the work of others.

Personally I think mental arithmetic is worth learning as it gives practice in working with numbers and as a first algorithm. Maybe it should be expanded earlier to other concepts like modulus.

The way computers do arithmetic has nothing to do with the way that a human given pen and paper does it. If we were serious about that, we should force kids to do it in binary.

It's just not the case that the arithmetical algorithms implemented in circuitry have "nothing to do" with pen and paper algorithms. The core ideas of the algorithms we teach kids to add, subtract, multiply, and divide carry over to different bases. The biggest difference between the algorithms implemented in circuitry and those we execute with pen and paper isn't the base, it's the fact that logical gates can be placed in parallel so there's some additional trickery in exploiting that maximally. But understanding the pen and paper algorithms, in whatever base, is still a good starting point for understanding how computers do arithmetic.

ripple-carry adders work the same way as a kid doing arithmetic on paper

Calligraphy is similar. Once an important art, now not even an afterthought. We need a understanding of math and algorithms but not really knowledge of the procedures.

Long addition is similar to calligraphy in the sense that its deprecation would have little effect on our civilisation's ability to continue functioning as is. They also both require patience to learn. The analogy is tempting.

However, contained within the process of learning long addition is a microcosm of our mathematical praxis: useful parables about logic, pattern, deduction, notation, communication, quantity, and more. There is a great deal to be derived from its study which, by scaffolding young minds, leads to more mathematical scientists, and hence value for society. I would have great difficulty arguing the same for calligraphy.

I don't always go out walking because I have somewhere to go!

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