Normally, I don’t write blog entries during work hours. I sometimes post stuff then, because it gets more traffic if it’s posted mid-day, but I don’t write. Except sometimes, when I come accross something that’s so ridiculous, so offensive, so patently mind-bogglingly stupid that I can’t work until I say something. Today is one of those days.
In the US, many school systems have been adopting something called the Common Core. The Common Core is an attempt to come up with one basic set of educational standards that are applied consistently in all of the states. This probably sounds like a straightforward, obvious thing. In my experience, most Europeans are actually shocked that the US doesn’t have anything like this. (In fact, at best, it’s historically been standardized state-by-state, or even school district by school district.) In the US, a high school diploma doesn’t really mean anything: the standards are so widely varied that you can’t count on much of anything!
The total mishmash of standards is obviously pretty dumb. The Common Core is an attempt to rationalize it, so that no matter where you go to school, there should be some basic commonality: when you finish 5th grade, you should be able to read at a certain level, do math at a certain level, etc.
Obviously, the common core isn’t perfect. It isn’t even necessarily particularly good. (The US being the US, it’s mostly focused on standardized tests.) But it’s better than nothing.
But again, the US being the US, there’s a lot of resistance to it. Some of it comes from the flaky left, which worries about how common standards will stifle the creativity of their perfect little flower children. Some of it comes from the loony right, which worries about how it’s a federal takeover of the education system which is going to brainwash their kiddies into perfect little socialists.
But the worst, the absolute inexcusable worst, are the pig-ignorant jackasses who hate standards because it might turn children into adults who are less pig-ignorant than their parents. The poster child for this bullshit attitude is State Senator Al Melvin of Arizona. Senator Melvin repeats the usual right-wing claptrap about the federal government, and goes on
to explain what he dislikes about the math standards.
The math standards, he says, teach “fuzzy math”. What makes it fuzzy math? Some of the problems use letters instead of numbers.
The state of Arizona should reject the Common Core math standards, because the math curicculum sometimes uses letters instead of numbers. After all, everyone knows that there’s nothing more to math than good old simple arithmetic! Letters in math problems are a liberal conspiracy to convince children to become gay!
The scary thing is that I’m not exaggerating here. An argument that I have, horrifyingly, heard several times from crazies is that letters are used in math classes to try to introduce moral relativism into math. They say that the whole reason for using letters is because with numbers, there’s one right answer. But letters don’t have a fixed value: you can change what the letters mean. And obviously, we’re introducing that into math because we want to make children think that questions don’t have a single correct answer.
No matter where in the world you go, you’ll find stupid people. I don’t think that the US is anything special when it comes to that. But it does seem like we’re more likely to take people like this, and put them into positions of power. How does a man who doesn’t know what algebra is get put into a position where he’s part of the committee that decides on educational standards for a state? What on earth is wrong with people who would elect someone like this?
Senator Melvin isn’t just some random guy who happened to get into the state legislature. He’s currently the front-runner in the election for Arizona’s next governor. Hey Arizona, don’t you think that maybe, just maybe, you should make sure that your governor knows high school algebra? I mean, really, do you think that if he can’t understand a variable in an equation, he’s going to be able to understand the state budget?!