As the UK gears up for a general election, there’s a lot of talk from politicians about how maths should be taught. The latest is from the Labour Party, stating that real world maths should be taught at primary school. While the idea of six year olds being able to interpret a pay slip, or exchange currency from Argentinian Peso to Czech Koruna, might seem appealing to some, and possibly make more sense to those six year olds than the maths they’re given currently, I do have some concerns.
For one thing, the real-life maths of today might have little meaning by the time these pupils are able to make independent choices and decisions. And for another, the notion that real-life contexts makes maths easier to understand and more engaging is slightly spurious. Pupils have an innate understanding of number, and patterns, as abstract ideas, and I think that time devoted to these concepts, as well as arithmetical and geometrical relationships, along with additive and proportional reasoning and so on, is time well spent.
And, much like all ‘new’ initiatives, it’s been done before, with the touting of ‘functional maths’ which was supposed to be a major new qualification about fifteen or twenty years ago, and then wasn’t really that major after all. A good curriculum always contains some real-world maths. I would argue that we don’t necessarily need lots more.