Tomorrow is A-level results day in the UK.
(If you’re not familiar with UK schooling, A-levels are what many students in England and Wales take as their final pre-college school exam and are key to college admission.)
To all those who've got good A-level maths and/or further maths grades—well done! Being focused enough to do this and having a sense of achievement and confidence from it is well worthwhile. To those who have had another "maths failure", it's important you see this in context.
Look, I don't want to remove achievement from the A* grade or absolve responsibility from a fail, but maths A-level is not the benchmark, learning basis for our AI age that it should be, and this really troubles me. Trashing people who don't need to be; falsifying achievement for people who actually need more understanding; setting many up for later failure.
Why? Wrong subject. Completely mismatched to real life. Procedures you wouldn’t use now, narrow techniques from yestercentury—not at all what people need in their future endeavours (university, vocational qualification, work, life) to make the best decisions. Not using computers for computation is disastrous—much more so than it first appears—and sets students up for failure (often including ones with top grades).
It's even worse. When maths A-level is argued for by politicians, employers, educationalists they often say things like "Those who do maths get the best jobs" and "Maths is now the most popular A-level". Even basic mathematical thinking, of the sort A-level ought to teach, should make everyone's alarm bells ring! Has maths A-level been correlated with those doing technical jobs (which now are often the highest paying) or is it causative? Anyone vaguely technical is pushed very hard to do maths A-level, so very hard to distinguish. And that's based on data from when maths A-level was more rarefied, and the world required somewhat different skills.
Yet it should absolutely be possible to make the core computational school subject causative for upping many skills and capabilities required of humans in the AI age. But that isn't today's maths A-level (which is more procedural and less conceptual than ever), very much more than Latin was causative for future success in the 1950s.
And using the word "popular" denotes, at least to me, that A-level maths is the enjoyed, free, unencumbered, choice—not the reality that many students are coerced (frankly some would say bullied) to take it through a mixture of pressure by superiors (parents, teachers) and concern about life choices—not because they really feel they want to do it. Would you say "paying taxes is popular"? After all, many do it.
In essence, which cohorts is all of this failing? To start with, those (probably many) who would be good at the conceptual maths we need, but are demoted and demoralised by their inability to perform procedural hand calculating required of A-level maths. Then there are those promised a rich future on the basis of good A-level maths, which it increasingly isn't delivering. Not to forget those who don't find any kind of maths that easy, but need usable constructs for modern decision making—good computational literacy that earlier GCSE or A-levels are not hitting.
I have a much more in-depth discussion in my book The Math(s) Fix, but the takeaway message is this: let's get A-level maths to represent what's actually needed, stop hyping what we're doing and ignoring all its mounting misdirection. The fact that it's so "popular" is in fact a great start for moving to something far more empowering (beyond the exam grades themselves), might be genuinely more popular and will enable a workforce that is optimally set up for the AI age.
If this topic interests you... my colleague Jon McLoone and I have just recorded a podcast on whether our maths A-levels have been useful to use in our work—part of a series of Computational Conversations we hold. Remember, maths is central to our work from more angles than almost anyone: using it, building tech with it/for it, consulting around it, working with millions of "maths" people around the world... and yet our conclusions might surprise you. (There’s a bonus section too. My daughter Sophia was in the office that day, so I hauled her in to sub for me at the end of the discussion with Jon. She’s a biosciences undergraduate at the University of Cambridge with a more modern perspective!)
Finally, the UK has a brand-new government with a big majority that’s ordered a curriculum review. A key pledge is to boost citizen education for upcoming jobs rather than just import it. Computational literacy is key to delivering that pledge. And so it is to societal cohesion, because without computational literacy, enfranchisem*nt is increasingly curtailed in turn because computation—data science, modelling, AI—is a basis for an increasing range of decisions. In response to recent UK rioting, I was pleased to read this week in an interview with Secretary of State for Education that the government does seem to recognise the need for “critical thinking”, including in maths, and says they will change curriculum to this end, that’s it’s not clear if they recognise how radical this needs to be to be effective. There's a real opportunity for change for Britain to seize the initiative, as it was for mass literacy a couple of hundred years ago.
Conrad Wolfram
a-level maths, computer maths, maths education, computational literacy
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