I like to read a fairly wide spectrum of blogs, especially ones about subjects that aren't my strong points. One of these subjects is education. I'm not at all versed in any modern educational methods. At best, I can claim to have observed education in action by attending a lot of classes myself. So, to keep an eye on this subject (which is of great concern to me, since it is so fundamental to our society as a whole), I read Joanne Jacob's excellent blog. Recently, she posted a link to a story that I would find incredible if the same sorts of story didn't keep showing up over and over on her blog: Why American consumers can't add.

To summarize the story at the link (and, by all means, go and read it for yourself – it's not long), United States adults suck at math:

• Only 42 percent were able to pick out two items on a menu, add them, and calculate a tip.
• Only 1 in 5 could reliably calculate mortgage interest.
• 1 in 5 could not calculate weekly salary when told an hourly pay rate.
• Only 13 percent were deemed “proficient.” Worse yet, only 1 in 10 women, 1 in 25 Hispanics and 1 in 50 African Americans made the grade.
• Half of 17 year olds couldn't do enough math to work in an auto plant, according to President's National Mathematics Advisory Panel.

Now, this isn't one of those, "Why do I have to learn algebra when I'll never need to use it in real life?" kind of questions. This is basic arithmetic. Think of those poor waiters out there, getting insufficient tips because most Americans are so bad at math that "15%" or "20%" is a mystery to them? It seems pretty clear that most Americans can't figure out compound interest, otherwise so many of them wouldn't have been completely bamboozled by variable interest rate loans, which they now try to blame on unscrupulous bankers. To me, this is a tragedy of Greek proportions.

We have better than two thousand years of practice in teaching arithmetic, a subject that has remained almost unchanged for that entire period. Could there possibly be a better refutation of "new" math? Math is not a subject traditionally learned at home (as you could argue for reading, at least a few decades ago). Arithmetic has been something you learned in school in this country for 200 years and, up until the last 25 or so, everyone did.

I learned math through calculus in the public schools of the 1960s and 1970s. None of my classmates in fifth grade would have batted an eye at adding two fractions or using percentages or doing long division. We had been drilled in arithmetic all of our classroom lives. It seems to me that two things have changed: the extent to which teachers are allowed to maintain discipline in the classroom and idea of learning by doing. Both of these seem ridiculously easy to fix, even in the most politically correct atmosphere.

Our collective ability to stuff our fingers in our ears and shout "I can't hear you!" while these structural and cultural problems are shouting at us is eventually going to endanger our civilization. When only a small fraction of your citizens can understand the basic language of science and technology, you are doomed to have less and less science and technology.

"Well, fine," I hear some of you Luddites saying, "we need to turn inward and away from all of the dehumanizing effects of science and technology." OK, who will you choose to die? I have a reminder for you: it's science and technology that keeps the many billions of us alive on this planet. Any significant decline in science and technology on this planet means millions will die of starvation, thirst, lack of medicine or the failure of critical infrastructure. Like it or not, we have a global civilization that is utterly dependent on science and technology and the fundamental language of science and technology is math. It's a hell of a lot more complicated math than calculating a tip, too.

I readily agree that not every citizen has to be competent at math. Certainly we don't need 99% numeracy and, equally certainly, 99% innumeracy is disaster. No matter where you assign the critical point in between, it's obvious with every new article like this that we are sliding down towards that critical point. We may be close to it or we may have a way to go, but the bottom is there and millions of lives depend on us never hitting bottom.

The article linked above makes the argument that "innumeracy is the biggest culprit" when it comes to the recent financial crisis. That makes me think we're getting pretty darned close to some critical number. So many of our citizens couldn't do simple math that they were unable to avoid a financial crisis that was largely fueled by consumers with inadequate numeracy to evaluate the pros and cons of borrowing money to buy a house. Sure, there was greed and magical thinking in the mix as well, but even the most magical thinker might have balked at the $250,000 loan taken out against their $50,000 salary if they had possessed the slightest clue about what the "adjustment" in their adjustable rate loan could do to them.

How big of a slap in the face will be required to wake us up? I don't know, but I know there are entrenched interests aligned against reform. Teachers and their unions are the ones who decided that learning by doing (i.e., repetitive math worksheets) was a bad idea and they won't take kindly to outsiders telling them otherwise. Lots of parents have no wish to help their kids through the tedious drills that make calculating a 15% tip a mental chore of five seconds. Our culture is quite happy to assign negative social status to intellectual achievement in general, but it's twice as quick to mock that mathematically inclined.

The average American expects that flipping the switch will lead to light. They don't care how it happens and, increasingly, they wouldn't understand how it happens if you explained it to them very simply. Since they can't do algebra, the very simplest of laws that apply to every electrical device or circuit, such as Ohm's law, is forever beyond their reach. They are entirely innocent of the Bernoulli principle (which is by no means complicated, follow the link and look at the picture on the right side of the page, it's all you need to know) that keeps their plane in the air. The Carnot cycle that propels their gasoline powered SUV is not only a mystery to them, but something they could not learn without starting over in grade school math. God help them if they ever wanted to understand the motor in their Prius, that would require what used to be high-school level calculus and you may as well be expecting them to scale Mount Everest.

I'm making a big point of this because the disaster will feed upon itself. If we ever fall below the threshold of numeracy required to maintain our civilization, it may take generations to reestablish it. During those generations, hundreds or thousands of millions will suffer.