I have recently been contacted by a friend who is worried at the decline in numeracy in the West. He asked me what I thought of the following:
In 2005, Newt Gingrich (who had been on the Hart-Rudman Commission) stated:
In 2005, Newt Gingrich (who had been on the Hart-Rudman Commission) stated:
The collapse of math and science education in the US and the relative decline of investment in basic research is an enormous strategic threat to American national security. … Keeping America competitive in the twenty-first century is dependent upon having increasing number of students studying math and science.An author by the name of Gladwell states, in his book Outliers,
Gladwell also refers to Stanislas Dehaene’s The Number Sense:The number system in English is highly irregular. Not so in China, Japan and Korea. They have a logical counting system. Eleven is ten one. Twelve is ten two. Twenty-four is two ten four, and so on.
That difference means that Asian children learn to count much faster. Four year old Chinese children can count, on average, up to forty. American children, at that age, can only count to fifteen, and don’t reach forty until they’re five: by the age of five, in other words, American children are already a year behind their Asian counterparts in the most fundamental of math skills.
Chinese number words are remarkably brief. Most of them can be uttered in less than one-quarter of a second (for instance, 4 is ’si’ and 7 ‘qi’) Their English equivalents—”four,” “seven”—are longer: pronouncing them takes about one-third of a second. The memory gap between English and Chinese apparently is entirely due to this difference in length. In languages as diverse as Welsh, Arabic, Chinese, English and Hebrew, there is a reproducible correlation between the time required to pronounce numbers in a given language and the memory span of its speakers. In this domain, the prize for efficacy goes to the Cantonese dialect of Chinese, whose brevity grants residents of Hong Kong a rocketing memory span of about 10 digits.
My friend says he is a bit sceptical of sources such as Malcolm Gladwell, so I told him I'd let you all comment on this, if you like. To which he said:
I'll have a good look at Scientific Blogging which looks great.Please don't let him down!
During the cold war, we were extremely competitive in attracting talent. In the 1990s we decided that the way to keep high wages was to block out intelligent foreigners who would work for a few thousand $ less and still have money to send home. So we restricted visas, but only for workers.
Thus we continued to educate smart people from all over the world; then we forced them to return home where they became competitors.
Gladwell may note Chinese kids can count to 40 faster than ours in the West - if only that's what mattered. America still leads in the high end, it's the individual contributors where we have fallen behind. With 3X our population and counting, the Chinese are sure to catch up eventually, but for right now the kind of job that requires talking fast and using simple arithmetic, like waiters, are not the jobs I am too worried about.