In the April issue of her magazine, Oprah Winfrey confesses that what she “knows for sure” doesn’t include math. “I am confident in most things that don’t require mathematical or technological skills. In those areas, I’m not just challenged — I’m functionally illiterate,” she writes.
Kudos to Oprah for making such an admission, especially since she attended college for nearly four years.
Thanks to tougher admission and graduation standards, it’s much harder these days to leave college with a degree and still be “functionally illiterate” in math. Unfortunately, it’s still common to leave high school with a diploma and be “functionally illiterate” in math. All kinds of businesses and community colleges can testify to that.
It’s the belated reason STEM education — science, technology, engineering and math — is all the rage. American students lag behind other industrialized countries when it comes to math, and many technological jobs lack qualified candidates, forcing reliance instead on foreign workers.
But our math problem is bigger than not having enough engineers. It’s not having citizens who can do basic math. It’s the separation of math and life. It’s the idea that math is only for the mathematically gifted. It’s the acceptance of the “functionally illiterate,” simply because they aren’t going to become an engineer, computer programmer or scientist. But to be a functioning citizen, one needs to be able to do basic arithmetic. All jobs include some kind of math or another, as does personal finance, cooking, home improvement projects, and most “life skills.”
Scary statistics, based on students who took ACT’s “college and career readiness” exam in 2012, show that 54 percent of high school graduates aren’t ready to go on in math. And those are the college hopefuls.
The ability to improve our STEM education first requires more focus on the basics, or the roots, if you will.
A Tacoma business that makes foam products for the aerospace industry, General Plastics Manufacturing Co., featured in a Thursday article about employers having a hard time hiring employees with basic math skills, reports that only one in 10 prospective workers passes its 18-question math test. The 30-minute test, with calculator allowed, asks would-be applicants, who must be high school graduates, how to convert inches to feet, read a tape measure and find the density of a block of foam (mass divided by volume), McClatchy Newspapers reported.
Every day, in politics, government and business, we are exhorted over and over again to “Do the math.” But so many of us, like Oprah but not as honest as her, don’t know how. It’s one of our national embarrassments. But we can change. (And even count change.)
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