Is Math Unnecessary? I came across this TedTalk video from one of my University classes. I found it absolutely amazing. John Bennett is a math teacher who faces the dreaded student question of "when am I going to use this in real life?". As you see in the video, John gives the standard responses, math is everywhere and the you need to get a good mark in math to be successful in post secondary. However, John discovered the only people that actually use high school level math are math teachers and engineers. Majority of the world's population do not have that as careers. In fact he argues that we learn all the necessary math concepts and ideas within elementary school. He deems that math in middle school and high school is unnecessary and that there are other means to teach problem solving skills, deductive reasoning and inductive reasoning. John Bennett has a point. The level of math taught in middle school and high school is rarely used outside school. Unless people become mathematicians, architects, physicists, engineers or similar types of jobs the topics learned seem almost useless to the general public. Should we get rid of math after elementary? I do not have the answer to that question. Students who wanted to pursue mathematics still could and the other skills learned in math can be taught in other curricular subjects.
This begs the question is teaching traditionally by breaking education into core subject areas is the proper way to teach our children. The old Math, Science, Social Studies and Language Arts split hasn't seen a change in the last few hundreds of years. Is it time to break down the walls and figure out a new way to teach? Integrating units and thematic units are slowly working to bring down the barriers proving that learning outcomes and skills can be achieved across multiple disciplines. In the same class where we watched the video we were given a task in which we were assigned to be teachers of a new colony on a planet. We were given ten minutes to name several topics that we felt would be important to teach the new society. Surprisingly out of the whole class no one mentioned the traditional classes. My group had classes like: Old Earth History, Resource Management, Conflict Management, Survival Skills, and Healthy Living. Isn't it interesting that everyone in our class had similar ideas? It brings me back to the controversial question of do we need to teach using the traditional subjects?