conrad-wolfram-870x400-1

Conrad Wolfram – Maths Reimagined

Conrad Wolfram, Founder of Wolfram Research Europe and Computer Based Maths, tells me that we spend around 21,000 average student lifetimes per year teaching the wrong thing in school and calling it mathematics. “Maths” he tells me, “is taught as if it were a dead language”, and I have to say from my own experience that I agree with him.

 

In my mind school maths, like its stablemate science, has what a marketeer might call “poor brand value”. When I was a kid, before health and safety were invented, science was something I did when grown-ups weren’t around, when I wasn’t supervised. They had something at my school called science but it wasn’t the kind of adventures that I was having making discoveries of my own. Unbeknownst to my parents I was experimenting with gunpowder, making fireworks, taking apart engines and electronics to see how they worked, making new ones, playing with all manner of chemical reactions. It was a childhood of self-directed discovery driven by my own curiosity and a boyhood fascination with how the world worked. The kind of things I called science as a child would probably get you arrested today.

 

Maths, I found out much later in life, is also something of beauty and of discovery rather than the kind of parroting of times tables and remembering of formulae to solve abstract questions that had made me and the majority of my peers disengage from the subject. I only re-engaged with maths as result of becoming inspired in the creation of digital music and art but even then I wasn’t really aware that I was “doing maths”.

 

The siloing of maths and other disciplines is what sucks the joy, discovery and relevance out of them. The lack of application to something that I had an interest in, that excited me or had relevance to a problem I wanted to solve meant that I missed out on the adventures that could be had within the world of maths.

 

Conrad, through initiatives like Computer Based Maths, seeks to transform the way in which our young people engage with mathematics. He suggests that kids in school spend 80% of their time concentrating, and more importantly being tested, on the wrong thing – calculating. Arguing that computers are much faster at calculating than people he proposes that we allow kids to develop more useful skills around defining and solving problems where computational tools are available to them.

 

It may be, of course, that we cling onto the notion of maths as calculating because it makes it easier to measure when it comes to testing but one has to ask whether such tests have any relevance to the real world or tell us anything useful about the student.

 

In my interview with Conrad he tells me:

 

“I think what’s often happened in maths is they’ve used the technology to try and replace the teacher with the wrong subject, and it’s failed. Maths is a system. In fact, you could argue it’s the best system of logical problem solving that the humans have ever invented.

 

That hasn’t got across to people. They see these abstract procedures that they have to apply. They don’t relate to the real world. The abstraction, I think, makes them fearful of it. They don’t understand it in many cases. Therefore, they don’t like it. They don’t do well at it. In fact, indeed the teachers don’t understand why they’re teaching it either.“

 

gbm-faceGraham Brown-Martin is the founder of Learning Without Frontiers (LWF), a global think tank that brought together renowned educators, technologists and creatives to share provocative and challenging ideas about the future of learning. He left LWF in 2013 to pursue new programmes and ideas to transform the way we learn, teach and live. His book, Learning {Re}imagined was recently published by Bloomsbury/WISE and is available now.

sir-ken-robinson-870x400-1

Sir Ken Robinson – The Education Economy

It has often struck me that a conflict of interest exists across education systems, state or private, where the awarding bodies of high stakes examinations are also owned by the very same companies who sell the content, that must be learned, to pass the test.

 

Such an end to end business model would make a lot of sense for the entrepreneurially minded and quite possibly create very large enterprises as a consequence. The “big edu” of the learning sector, if you don’t mind indulging my conspiratorial whimsy for a moment longer.  Imagine if automotive companies were owned by the oil industry. We would still be driving around in cars that did 5 miles to the gallon with no sign of a real commitment to clean, sustainable energy in sight. End to end business models, cartels and monopolies tend to be bad for innovation and progress. Even Apple doesn’t own all the companies who make apps for it’s platforms.

 

A similar conflict in the education sector, if it existed, would surely mean that change would be slow coming and that our schools would be held in a kind of persistent groundhog day for, say, 200 years or more. Should there be a shift in technology then no doubt these advances would be deployed to maintain the status quo, whilst reducing cost and improving efficiency. Perhaps the content could be digitised and fed to children using advanced computer algorithms that search for patterns in the data trail of its usage so that there would be a feedback loop to ensure every kid past a standardised test. Teachers optional.

 

My musing on this subject may seem somewhat fanciful but we have undoubtedly entered a new age of “evidence based practice” where the data can not lie. I’ve often thought that “evidence based practice” was a clever slogan whose rhetorical effect was to discredit  opposition. After all, who could possibly argue with the evidence and the data or that practice could be based on intuition rather than “the facts.”?

 

Well that’s an argument for another day but whilst interviewing Sir Ken Robinson in Los Angeles for Learning {Re}imagined we discussed what we agreed was a “tyranny of testing“. The pre-occupation with high stakes testing at young ages, when kids are in high school or earlier, seems patently detrimental to learning and, of course, teaching, providing a false metric for the success of a school or indeed the nations that depend on them.

 

Here is an excerpt from my interview. Robinson draws parallels between “big education”, “big pharma” and even “big tobacco”, suggesting that there is gold in maintaining the status quo for those who stand to benefit financially. He says:

 

“I do think we live under a tyranny of testing. I think there’s no question about that. It’s not totally benign. An interesting parallel to me is the drug industry. Depression is now a worldwide epidemic. It’s anticipated that within about 20 years, according to the World Health Organisation, I’m told, that depression will be the single largest cause of mortality among human populations. Depression.

 

Well, the drug companies profit hugely from depression and all that kind of related, ancillary commercial interests. It doesn’t seem to me that they’re very keen to cure depression. Why would they? It’s not that the people who produce acid reflux pills out trying to cure acid reflux. They want you to keep taking it, so you can keep buying their products.

 

Like cigarette manufacturers aren’t trying to wean you off cigarettes. There’s a kind of benign view of testing which is that it fulfils necessary purposes in relation to keeping track of standards, accountability in providing certification and qualifications for progress through the system. There’s a benign way of looking at them saying, well, it meets those important purposes in education, and there’s something to be said about that. What’s also true is it’s a massively profitable enterprise for all publishers. It’s one of the engines of the education economy.“

Have a look and tell me what you think

 

 

Graham Brown-Martin is the founder of Learning Without Frontiers (LWF), a global think tank that brought together renowned educators, technologists and creatives to share provocative and challenging ideas about the future of learning. He left LWF in 2013 to pursue new programmes and ideas to transform the way we learn, teach and live. His book, Learning {Re}imagined was recently published by Bloomsbury/WISE and is available now.