While that might be the case France has an excellent math culture at the research level. There's a lot of French folks in the Deep Learning community. LeCun, François Chollet among others, and France has won 13 Fields medals, way ahead of anyone but the US (at 15). France probably has the strongest math community in Europe.
I'm not as charitable as you are. Chollet left for the USA, LeCun for Canada.
France has an extremely small, but great math community via the ENS/Sorbonne/X schools, but it hardly reflects on a larger trend -- general education. The topic isn't the culturing of a select, few elites, but the education of the larger population.
"At research level" is the keyword here. We've both the second highest number of Fields medalists and a frankly low score at the 2018 PISA evaluation (especially in comparison to other European countries). The maths education in secondary and higher eduction is somewhat elitist, in the sense that it's not suited for all kinds of students.
Engineering is not glamorous here at all, which I think is a shame because it's a productive, generative, job, with good qualifications needed, and it has a good earning potential. It's much less sought after than working in "marketing", yet probably on average a better job in many ways.
Software Engineering and "working in IT" does have a different perception and is considered "cooler", even though the vast majority of our IT jobs are awful.
> Engineering is not glamorous here at all, which I think is a shame because it's a productive, generative, job, with good qualifications needed, and it has a good earning potential.
Big focus on money here.
Being an engineer is also:
- rewarding in its own right (you *build* things)
- an achievement to be proud of
- a way to have a long lasting net contribution to society with - usually - little moral downside
>Software Engineering and "working in IT" does have a different perception and is considered "cooler", even though the vast majority of our IT jobs are awful.
I think that is a fairly recent change, it certainly wasn't the case when I started my career in the eighties.
British elite culture privileges spivs, gamblers, bullies, and opportunists. Intelligent competent professionals capable of critical thinking make the people in power nervous.
In addition to my engineering degree, I also received a token degree in mathematics from the university where I studied.
It seems that this is a vestige of the past when the university was established and the only way to include engineering as a subject of study was to classify it as a subdivision of mathematics.
Although the university is not currently based in the UK, there was a time when it did not permit Catholics to enroll as students either...
It's not even about engineering. Culturally people who would be embarrassed to say "oh, I can't really read properly" have no issue with saying "I can't work out percentages".
> "The prime minister needs to show his working: he cannot deliver this reheated, empty pledge without more maths teachers," shadow education secretary Bridget Phillipson said.
Correct. Important context for this is the ongoing balloting for strike action over teachers pay. Anyone who can do maths can read their own payslip and know when they're better off in the private sector doing anything else. The recruitment shortage is serious: https://committees.parliament.uk/committee/203/education-com...
> A 2022 report by the National Foundation for Educational Research shows that the teacher supply challenge is marked particularly by a lack of physics, chemistry and maths teachers. For physics, only 17% of the target to recruit 2,610 trainees was achieved, with only 444 new entrants. The Committee was recently told that at this current level of supply, it would be impossible to carry out the Prime Minister’s proposal of requiring pupils to study maths until 18.
In other words, this is already impossible, and no amount of "mindset changing" (wishful thinking) is going to change otherwise. You're only hearing this now because the local elections are soon.
I don't understand; surely teacher supply is a relevant factor? More/better/less strained teachers encourage people to want to study maths, and help them do so.
Private schools feed into the top universities because the private schools provide actual education. The problem isnt that private schools are too good or that private schools educated people get better grades.
The problem is that the majority of pupils in state schools, be they intelligent or not intelligent never stand a chance and are recieving a terrible formal education.
Are you prepared to devote the resources necessary to provide class sizes in 'state' schools in the UK that match the class sizes found in private (i.e. 'Public') schools?
I am, many are not - in the timeframe of an election cycle it is wasted money. The money spent today would only show positive returns in 10-20 years time.
State school in the UK costs the governement £7,100 a year per pupil vs £13,700 a year for private schools (averages). The government is getting poor value for money, but it would cost ~50bn a year to send every secondary state school pupil to private schools.
It is cheaper to simply pander to your base, make the next generation of their offspring dumber and blame the foreigners or the rich people or boats or whatever gets people angry. It actually increases the size of your political base, with the only downside that it dumps your future party with a massive social welfare bill in the distant future. By then they will be burying you at a state funeral, and your decendants will be living offshore somewhere nice talking about how great the country was back in your day.
Goes back a long way, c.f. C. P. Snow and the Two Cultures book or article in the 50s. Before that Charles Babbage had something to say about the state and teaching of mathematics in British universities.
My personal view is that there has to be a wider discussion on what 16 to 18 education is actually for in the UK, or at least England and Wales (Scotland has a different system, not sure about the Province).
To what extent do we have specialised often vocational courses for students? Do GCSE exams at age 16 still actually have a function?
Then you can have a discussion about the role of quantitative and logical thought in whatever system you decide to have.
PS: I'd keep mathematicians at least 50 miles away from any committee working on this. Nice people, but a tiny minority of the communities of practice who use mathematics to make decisions.
"They hate you if you're clever and they despise a fool. 'Til you're so fucking crazy, you can't follow their rules." - John Lennon - Working Class Hero
Just another hollow promise from a prime minster and administration that are staring electoral defeat in a years time.
The trend at the moment is to announce 'reviews' that capture headlines while doing absolutely nothing about the actual problems. When this doesn't work, get back to fighting the culture wars.
For example, we've had multiple reviews, and actual announcements on the legal side, which replicate already existing powers. It's a joke.
It's cliche to say that the current administration is the worst we've ever seen ... but the last decade has demonstrated that cliche as fact in the UK's case.
The UK has had government-by-press-release for decades now. But with this administration empty spin, emotive dog whistling and grandstanding, and relentless reality denial have completely replaced substance.
This. The last decade has been absolutely devastating to the UK. We were actually getting somewhere before that - good investment in infrastructure, in education, long term thinking about all the things that require long term thinking. And then the Daily Mail oldies kick in with Brexit b/s, Truss, Sunak. And now we're a dysfunctional and mostly irrelevant backwater. Sad times.
I never understood why Miliband didn't win the 2015 election. The Tories were presiding over some pretty bad austerity politics and LD lost their support base by going into coalition. Plus Miliband seemed like a really decent chap, known face from the previous Labour government but not tarnished.
I had left the UK by then so I wasn't paying much attention to what went on, but when I did pay more attention when Brexit was rearing its head Cameron seemed like such a wanky toff it's hard to understand how his govt had not only got back in but were in a better position.
From my memory what mainly lost his backing from the general public was the horrendous antics of Dianne Abbot and her place at the front bench of the labour government.
Everything that woman said and did leeched coherence and unity from the shadow government.
(Abbot is the most maligned person in UK politics; I believe someone did a survey of all hate mail (or email?) sent to the House of Commons, and found that a whole third of it was for her alone. I would simply not trust media-informed views of her, unfortunately)
I too was looking on from abroad, the only things that reached me were that Miliband was a little bit goofy and that he wan't the favoured candidate by the Murdoch papers (where he took an absolute hammering, I think we all saw the picture of him eating a bacon roll)
Honestly he was a good guy, and was one of the few MPs who didn't get caught up in the expenses scandal. Yeah I think unfortunately people were easily persuaded that this made him look incompetent (I didn't vote, would have voted SNP and my constituency comfortably elected an SNP MP anyway). Shame really, given what transpired in the eight years that followed. It wasn't the last time a left-leaning Labour leader got that treatment, Corbyn was similarly crucified in the press.
>> I never understood why Miliband didn't win the 2015 election.
Huh that is very easy to understand. There were two main reasons:
1. Labour had left the government essentially bankrupt, literally leaving the coalition a note that said "there's no money anywhere" iirc. The new government had come in and discovered the finances of the state had been utterly ruined. The numbers were stark and voters had accepted the argument that budget cutbacks were necessary to try and right the ship.
Labour had sort of accepted that this situation was true, but failed to take it seriously. Miliband supposedly had a minor meltdown after he tried to give a long speech without notes, and then realized only afterwards that he'd forgotten the entire section about the deficit. That was the number one issue in British politics at the time!
2. The EU had been building as a bigger and bigger problem over time. Voters were increasingly upset that their concerns on major policy areas like immigration were being systematically ignored by all the major parties, except for the eurosceptic wing of the Tories. Neither Labour nor the mainline Tories nor the Lib Dems wanted to tackle this problem. UKIP came along and started hoovering up votes from both left and right by promising a referendum on the EU. Cameron saw what was happening and decided he could end UKIP, win the election and also crush the eurosceptics by promising an EU referendum he was convinced he could win. That caused a whole lot of voters to abandon UKIP and vote Tory in the correct belief that Cameron would honor his promise. The rest is history.
Point 1 was pretty dumb if people believed that. The UK government wasn't in a unique position after the 2008 monetary crisis, but they were pretty much the only government that could have borrowed and spent out of it and didn't. The results seem to speak for themselves.
I didn't know there was a building EU resentment (beyond the stupid stuff I'd heard growing up in the UK). I was living in Europe at the time. It all seems so bizarre.
The issue for (1) was that the government had already been borrowing and spending a great deal. Blair was fairly restrained but after Brown came in, he opened the taps and government spending and borrowing skyrocketed. Then the financial crisis came in on top of that too. At any rate, regardless of what you think the right solution was, the population agreed that spending at such high levels above tax revenue wasn't sustainable and some cutbacks were needed. And again, remember, Labour accepted this argument! They didn't try to claim it was wrong. They just didn't seem to take it seriously and often forgot about it. So the Conservatives argued that Labour couldn't be trusted with the finances now Blair was gone and they'd create a re-run of the 70s, and voters agreed with that argument.
Resentment against the EU had been building for years due partly to the totally incorrect initial claims made about immigration levels, and then the lack of interest/ability in controlling it. Even voters who weren't that affected by it saw that there were now real issues that affected local people which had effectively been removed from democracy and felt that was wrong. So there was a broad coalition being built by Farage, both the people who cared primarily about immigration levels and wage suppression of the working classes, and also those who cared about the constitutional issue it was exposing.
"Blair was fairly restrained but after Brown came in, he opened the taps and government spending and borrowing skyrocketed. "
That's an odd framing of events considering Brown came in midway through 2007. Just before the 2008 GFC.
You make it sound like he went Brown went on a spending spree on a whim ... that isn't what happened. Any increased spending that took place when he became PM was easily within the scope of the UK economy. And considering National Debt was well managed until then (during a time when Brown was Chancellor), your recollection of what happened is wrong.
Your own graph shows that during Brown's time debt went from 35% of GDP to 70% of GDP, and yet Labour had nothing to say on the topic of reducing government spending to slow down that skyrocketing rise. It was only after 2010 that the rate of growth slowed and eventually reached zero before lockdowns (a policy demanded by hard left academics) pushed it up to 100% of GDP.
And that is exactly the point being made. Brown was in charge when the economy entered a crisis and yet was too left wing to slam the brakes on government spending in response. Voters reacted accordingly.
I'm borderline incredulous at your interpretation ... were you around in 2008?
Do you not remember bailing out the banks?
Emergency stimuli to keep the economy going from recession to depression?
Decreasing tax revenue as the economy entered recession?
And yet, you say Brown was too left wing to slam on the brakes on government spending? ... we would be finished as a nation if you were in charge.
It's just me and you. I'm sure no one else is reading this. So I'll just say. I'm quite confident you have no idea what you're talking about. Either you were too young at the time, no idea how the economy works (especially during a crisis) or ... let's leave it at that.
Of course I remember these things, I was an adult at the time. You're maybe willfully misinterpreting my point.
It doesn't matter why Brown spent so much money. What matters is that after he did so nobody in the Labour hierarchy adjusted to the new reality that they'd spent all the money, and they'd need to implement austerity via large budget cuts to try and reduce the suddenly massive deficit. The Conservatives did realize that, did make that argument, and the voters agreed with them. Which is the point I've been making all along.
BTW it's very rich that in a thread where I'm having to remind people about the issues in an election that only happened 13 years ago, you're claiming I'm too young to remember what happened at the time! The economy, Labour's claims to be competent at it "we have ended boom and bust" etc followed by their Labour's inability to seem serious about the deficit remained an issue for years. Don't you recall Miliband's doomed notes-free speech and his subsequent political exile? That was in 2014. Even years after losing to the coalition, they still didn't want to talk about cutting public sector spending and voters reacted accordingly:
"People stopped trusting the party and they didn’t believe what it said about foreign wars, the state of the economy, reform of Parliament and public spending"
I entered this thread with a chart that presents data.
I'm not interested in the politics of why the voters voted they way they did. And your assertions on that are like picking a few leaves off a tree and saying that they are the reason the tree grows.
Your contention was that "Brown was too left wing to slam on the spending brakes".
My contention is that the chart I posted would have looked largely the same whichever party was in power. The only difference would have been the degree and speed of action. And it was this that Conservatives got wrong and which I think that Brown would have done better with. He wasn't a good PM, but he knew what mattered on the economy.
And you can run a clear line from the decisions that were made by the Conservatives at the time to where we are today. The mistakes made (David Cameron with Brexit, Austerity, and now political corruption and malaise) have effectively ruined the potential of Britain for decades to come.
I'm not here to defend Brown, but I do understand the position he was in. Anything else is political garbage.
But this thread and my entry to it started with this statement by someone else:
>> I never understood why Miliband didn't win the 2015 election.
And so this thread is an attempt to explain that, by reference to Labour's legacy of not being willing to reduce public spending.
>> My contention is that the chart I posted would have looked largely the same whichever party was in power.
It might have done, but Brown didn't argue that. In the leadup to 2010 he argued that he would simply not increase it further, in contrast to the "savage cuts" planned by the Tories.
I specified which section of your comment I objected to. You were welcome to ignore it or focus on it.
Brown just wasn't charismatic and he made some critical political timing errors. You can have one but you can't have both and he deserved to lose the election.
With the economy, however, he played a blinder and it's under-appreciated. The subsequent clowns have proven that. Brown's mistake was his desire to be PM.
It’s tackling problems by committee which has never worked. You need structural boots on the ground presence to commit any changes, and campaigns to inform about changes, and examples: people and situations that show what can be done by the proposed changes.
It's not mentioned in the article but I think there's a big gender split as well. This is only anecdotal, but my sister was told all the way through school that she wasn't good at maths, despite being in a Grammar School (requires an exam to get in). She ended up doing well in her exams despite years of criticism, and is now a teacher, teaching maths among other things. Again, anecdotally, I more commonly see women laugh off terrible maths skills as "oh ha ha yes I'm not good with numbers".
It's just sexism. From teachers to exams to parents to pop culture, we've decided that women are worse at maths which is obviously both untrue and incredibly damaging. Maybe we should be tackling that.
I’ve read quite a few times that more girls take higher level maths as well as sciences at second level than boys, but this reverses when it comes to third level. My anecdotal school experience was that higher maths as well as chemistry and biology had more girls than boys while physics had slightly more boys.
Which is occurring because of an initiative from around a decade ago. Initiatives and programmes for school improvement &c have a habit of persisting like zombies.
This doesn't match with my experience in a Scottish state school, albeit way back in 1997-2003. In the top class in maths we always had more girls than boys throughout my time there. If anything boys were often treated as a nuisance for the first four years of secondary school - many leave aged 16 to work in farming or in oil - and you're only taken seriously if you stick around for the final two years.
Coming through an isolated, rural school like this then hitting the real world where the roles are reversed (women are more frequently discriminated against, paid worse) - was a bit of a shock. Note that I didn't suffer at school or anything, it was just sort of accepted that if you were a boy and you wanted to achieve academically you were going against the grain and you were largely on your own.
It is definitely true that as a country the self-deprecating "haha I'm rubbish at maths" attitude is pretty common, I don't whether that is indicative of actual ability or if it's just something people say.
Yeah my SO had a math teacher in middle school which had (as far as I can determine) decided she wasn't good at math. He didn't like those who weren't good, so he never helped her and even talked her down in class. As such she started to resent the math classes, and later on she avoided math, focusing on other things.
We met when she had her last year in high school, and she was unsure what to do for college or otherwise. She ended up taking a gap year to figure things out. I encouraged her to explore the options, and through a friend found she really wanted to do construction engineering.
To do that, she had to take a year to get some extra math and physics classes.
The start was rough, she had a fear of math and was lacking in basics like algebra. But she was determined to try. Meanwhile I'd been in college for a couple of years and gotten the basic math classes there for my CS degree. I enjoyed math, so tried to help her.
I quickly realized however I had to go back to basics and build some foundations. Back to basics with fractions, basic equation solving etc. After a few weeks of hard work from the both of us, and nearly giving up, things started to fall into place. She started to realized she could understand math, and with that it became a lot more fun.
After a couple of months, it turned out she was actually quite good at math! She picked up new concepts without much struggle, and my help was less and less needed. At the end of the year she passed the exams with high marks, and all I had done to help prepare was just to sit with her and check her answers as she went through previous exams.
Learning maths was fine for me, up to university level.
However I would not make the mistake that this would work for everyone, people do have different strengths. I would not have coped with e.g. Art or Music to that level, and there is no point in forcing maths on people who have those strengths. It's not one-size fits all. Aptitudes do vary and education should lean into that.
Up to what level though? IMHO, the stated plan "to ensure all school pupils in England study some maths until the age of 18" is a pointless distraction that does not solve any real urgent problem. Which are many.
Why work hard on math when they can be taken by foriegners from China, India, and Russia? They have stronger STEM skills and they are KEEN to come to the UK even if they get paid below their worth? So locals can't compete so don't bother.
> "Of course foreigners steal your job, but maybe, if someone without contacts, money, or speaking the language steals your job, you're shit." ~ Louis C. K.
It's important to understand the context behind this, Rishi Sunak went to one of the top private schools in the country, he went on to study PPE, went to Goldman and then was parachuted in to a safe tory seat, he then took on various positions at the treasury before becoming Chancellor and then PM.
All this is to say- Rishi Sunak has literally never in his life had any contact at all with state maths education in this country. This is just one of those weird idiosyncrasies of a guy who has a really strong opinion that maths is important having done absolutely nothing to study the issue.
So what we end up with is a policy where Rishi Sunak plans to make maths education better... whilst massively cutting school budgets. Teachers unions are all voting to strike because he tried to negotiate a pay deal with them that involved them getting a pay rise that had to be funded out of existing school budgets (ie, you can have a pay rise, but it's going to mean you have to turn the central heating off in your schools and stop mending the holes in the roofs). It's just a completely out of touch approach. This new initiative won't touch the sides against the damage childrens eduction will take due to the failure to pay teachers properly.
He doesn't need to, he has 'Secretary of State for Education' in the UK working for him who is responsible for understanding the problem and brining it to the PM.
Well, it's more important to see that actions Rishi Sunak is taking than what his background is. This is an important problem (STEM - Mathematics Education) that he is tackling which no one else before him bothered to.
Regarding his background, it's like saying the CEO of the company has no clue about the software that we build because he never fixes the bugs. The job of a Prime Minister of a CEO is not to be in the nitty gritty of the issues, that's the job of the people who work under him just like IC's and Eng Leaders, then they are supposed to bubble up the important issues and explain to him. Having said that, he is best suited as he brings strategic thinking (learned at Goldman, Stanford) to solve these dire problems.
Maybe in Goldman that's where he learned to betray repeatedly his colleagues
As to what knowledge he brings to the table, the answer is nothing. He's just buddies with the IB establishment. That's why I would vote Starmer despite being right of center, him being positioned ahead of voter desires was unacceptable.
"This is an important problem (STEM - Mathematics Education) that he is tackling which no one else before him bothered to."
The first part of your sentence above is fine. The second part is not consistent with the record. There have been quite a number of initiatives and programmes to try and improve mathematics in Schools and Colleges over the past 40 years or so in England and Wales.
I think I might need to go digging and put a list up somewhere.
If you want good maths education the first step might be to make sure the maths teachers aren't going out on strike, and the second step might be to make sure you're recruiting enough maths teachers - he's acheived neither.
It's not a criticism to say that his background isn't in education, it's an explanation of why he's come up with some weird priority out of the blue and created a solution that no one thinks will work. This isn't about the Prime Minister being the CEO and therefore not needing to worry about the details. A strategic thinker might address the actual issues facing the country rather than blathering about how actors should be forced to learn maths. Should we have interupted Sunak's education to teach him about acting? I think it might have been a good idea, he might have learned to empathize with others a bit rather than coming up with dumb ideas about how every child in Britain needs to be a little Rishi Sunak.
And the third step would be to ensure the classroom also had sufficient funding so it had all the right teaching materials (and the classroom was usable learning environment). Less pupils per teacher we know helps as well.
I'm no more of a fan of Sunak than (it appears that) you are, but you seem to be espousing a model of leadership that says "people can only opine on things that they have direct personal experience of".
That's clearly nonsense. In a well-run large organisation (which I definitely not saying the UK Government is!) leaders can legitimiately be provided with information that then informs their opinions; they can delegate topics to trusted subordinates to define policy; they can choose to 'sponsor' a topic to give it extra importance, without having done a personal deep-dive into the subject. This is just the reality of leading a large organsation.
There are absolutely examples of senior politicians taking pet issues on. For example Theresa May was genuinely dedicated to tackling modern slavery. The problem for Sunak is that if you look at his record he's got no junior ministerial experience, no experience on a select committee that's relevant, no record on an all party parliamentary group, not legislative record. He simply has never seriously engaged on this issue, and it's not a serious idea - think about someone with low acheivement in maths GCSE - that student is going to be an immense drain on sources to productively teach maths.
> There are absolutely examples of senior politicians taking pet issues on. For example Theresa May was genuinely dedicated to tackling modern slavery.
Sure; but I didn't say anything to the contrary. I was arguing the opposite: that a leader doesn't need to have direct experience of an issue, to 'sponsor' a related initiative.
> The problem for Sunak is that if you look at his record he's got no junior ministerial experience, no experience on a select committee that's relevant, no record on an all party parliamentary group, not legislative record. He simply has never seriously engaged on this issue, and it's not a serious idea - think about someone with low acheivement in maths GCSE - that student is going to be an immense drain on sources to productively teach maths.
These are all great points, but these aren't the points you were making in your initial post - where you were arguing that he shouldn't be pushing an initiative related to maths education because "Rishi Sunak has literally never in his life had any contact at all with state maths education in this country".
You understand the broader point I'm making, right? He has no interest in this. From birth to today he has had zero interaction with state mathematics education and even given the opportunity, has chosen to go nowhere near it. I was illustrating my agreement with you by showing the May example because that's what genuine intervention on a topic looks like - which is not what Sunak is doing here. I do wonder if he just genuinely hasn't been in parliament long enough to know what actual strategy would look like. I personally think Michael Gove is a terrible human being, but if Gove decided to intervene around improving the standard of Maths in the UK, he'd atleast intervene in a way that is effective (even if weirdly ideological). This just makes Sunak look like a dilletante. In a thousand ways it's a dumb policy thought up by someone who didn't spend 2 seconds actually thinking. It's what a 6th former at Winchester who is into Maths would think would be good govenrment policy.
Likewise, I’m not sure you’re understanding the points I’m trying to make :)
I’m lucky enough to never have been homeless (and I’ve never worked in that area either) but if I was Prime Minister, it’s an area I’d focus on. But… as PM, I’d likely delegate the details to whichever Secretary of State was most logical, and be happy to act as a sponsor, or figurehead.
Does this mean whatever my government did in this would be worthless, and I’d just be being superficial? Not necessarily: the policies and delivery should be judged on their merit, independently of how they were developed or pushed.
This is my point. It doesn’t matter whether Sunak is historically deeply invested in the area - as PM, he’s just supporting something he believes (not incorrectly) is worthwhile. That’s absolutely okay.
The policy itself will have likely been worked in by a plethora of different folk: civil servants, special advisors, domain experts, ministers - and probably least of all Sunak himself.
So judge the content and delivery of the policy on its merits. It may be a terrible policy - but that’s independent of whether the PM is expert or deeply invested in the area.
I agree in principle that you can care about and adopt an issue you know nothing about. The problem is to do that in a productive way you have to actually delegate authority and then back whoever you delegated to. That's not what's happening here - the PM has decided on a nonsensical policy, and is pushing it despite not knowing anything about the subject area. We've seen this re-inforced today - they wanted to launch a PR campaign to support this policy. Who did they get to head this campaign? Stephen Follows, a film data analyst. Does Stephen agree with the policy? Nope! And I quote
> Nobody thought to ask me whether I support this policy
My concern is this - there are policy aims, like ending modern slavery or improving maths education (or even just improving the status of maths in the UK), and then there are actual policies. What Sunak is doing here is endorsing a policy in order to achieve a policy aim. But the policy he's endorsing is a policy that will be totally ineffective at achieving that aim.
You're right - ideally the policy would've been worked on by Spads, domain experts, etc. But it wasn't. It was a half-cocked idea that he came up with by himself. How do we know this? The policy is nonsense! No one seriously thinks it will achieve the policy aim, you can't actually endorse a policy that both insists on more maths education and endorse a policy to give maths teachers a massive pay cut.
I understand how this is meant to work, what i'm saying is it very clearly isn't working that way.
The vast majority of people do not need to be buried under calculus, it's almost as stupid as teaching kids to write with joined up handwriting, it's of no relevance to the real world and it turns people off.
However we have a population that have no idea about how things like interest rates work, how loans, mortgages, savings etc work, what pensions do, how to determine if that 2-for-1 deal is better than that separate 50% off deal, the total cost of ownership for a 3 month phone bundled contract vs buying the phone upfront (or with a loan), etc.
None of that is taught in maths. It could be taught in numeracy or finance or some other lesson, it should be taught, but there's a big difference between doing matrix transformations of imaginary numbers and working out that you're being fleeced by Tesco
Buying things with finance often makes sense when the cost of the interest is less than the opportunity cost of using the money elsewhere
Unfortunatly people don't have the skills to judge the total cost, or the value, so either listen to one of two extremes of "just buy on finance" vs "never buy on finance"
I was certainly taught simple and compound interest and APR/AER for GCSE maths which is about as far as is needed.
But one problem is that most of this goes well beyond maths and really becomes more like law.
The worst example perhaps is pensions. The difficult part isn't "how much do I need to invest to get a decent pension?". Its everything else - how much can you contribute? When? How does this change if you have a change in circumstances? What are inheritance rights? Can I move my pension with me if I change job? What protected rights do I have and which of those have value to me? What is the tax position now and when you retire? This is much less about maths and much more about being able to navigate an insanely complicated set of rules built up over about 3 decades of government changing them more or less every year then adding in special case exceptions or saving clauses.
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[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 108 ms ] threadThe engineer, while appreciated, is not admired in Britain.
France has an extremely small, but great math community via the ENS/Sorbonne/X schools, but it hardly reflects on a larger trend -- general education. The topic isn't the culturing of a select, few elites, but the education of the larger population.
source: https://data.oecd.org/pisa/mathematics-performance-pisa.htm
Software Engineering and "working in IT" does have a different perception and is considered "cooler", even though the vast majority of our IT jobs are awful.
Big focus on money here.
Being an engineer is also:
I'd put these ahead of any financial reward.I think that is a fairly recent change, it certainly wasn't the case when I started my career in the eighties.
"In Britain" is a bit general; but in the circles of senior politicians and civil servants in Westminster, it's likely accurate.
It seems that this is a vestige of the past when the university was established and the only way to include engineering as a subject of study was to classify it as a subdivision of mathematics.
Although the university is not currently based in the UK, there was a time when it did not permit Catholics to enroll as students either...
Correct. Important context for this is the ongoing balloting for strike action over teachers pay. Anyone who can do maths can read their own payslip and know when they're better off in the private sector doing anything else. The recruitment shortage is serious: https://committees.parliament.uk/committee/203/education-com...
> A 2022 report by the National Foundation for Educational Research shows that the teacher supply challenge is marked particularly by a lack of physics, chemistry and maths teachers. For physics, only 17% of the target to recruit 2,610 trainees was achieved, with only 444 new entrants. The Committee was recently told that at this current level of supply, it would be impossible to carry out the Prime Minister’s proposal of requiring pupils to study maths until 18.
In other words, this is already impossible, and no amount of "mindset changing" (wishful thinking) is going to change otherwise. You're only hearing this now because the local elections are soon.
> Underpay and overwork teachers while using them as pawns in your transphobic culture war, so that they constantly strike and quit in their thousands
> Economically isolate the UK and cripple all its key public services while still somehow failing to cut most people's tax bill
"My economy is unhealthy because people aren't studying enough maths, I will have my army of teachers fix this problem".
My personal experience as a Brit is that the UK has a growing trend of anti-intellectualism and being innumerate is "cool" in certain circles.
The problem is that the majority of pupils in state schools, be they intelligent or not intelligent never stand a chance and are recieving a terrible formal education.
Might cost a bit.
State school in the UK costs the governement £7,100 a year per pupil vs £13,700 a year for private schools (averages). The government is getting poor value for money, but it would cost ~50bn a year to send every secondary state school pupil to private schools.
It is cheaper to simply pander to your base, make the next generation of their offspring dumber and blame the foreigners or the rich people or boats or whatever gets people angry. It actually increases the size of your political base, with the only downside that it dumps your future party with a massive social welfare bill in the distant future. By then they will be burying you at a state funeral, and your decendants will be living offshore somewhere nice talking about how great the country was back in your day.
My personal view is that there has to be a wider discussion on what 16 to 18 education is actually for in the UK, or at least England and Wales (Scotland has a different system, not sure about the Province).
To what extent do we have specialised often vocational courses for students? Do GCSE exams at age 16 still actually have a function?
Then you can have a discussion about the role of quantitative and logical thought in whatever system you decide to have.
PS: I'd keep mathematicians at least 50 miles away from any committee working on this. Nice people, but a tiny minority of the communities of practice who use mathematics to make decisions.
I ask because "The Two Cultures" was 1959: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures
Even where people recognise the value of maths, some of the responses I've seen to this use rhetoric-disguised-as-maths such as this: https://nitter.net/Samfr/status/1647717775777972224
The trend at the moment is to announce 'reviews' that capture headlines while doing absolutely nothing about the actual problems. When this doesn't work, get back to fighting the culture wars.
For example, we've had multiple reviews, and actual announcements on the legal side, which replicate already existing powers. It's a joke.
It's cliche to say that the current administration is the worst we've ever seen ... but the last decade has demonstrated that cliche as fact in the UK's case.
"Guys, be more like me and be better at Math"
In fact Sunak is 99% all about posturing. We don't know what real things he has accomplished, as he was not voted into the PM role, but "positioned"
I had left the UK by then so I wasn't paying much attention to what went on, but when I did pay more attention when Brexit was rearing its head Cameron seemed like such a wanky toff it's hard to understand how his govt had not only got back in but were in a better position.
(Abbot is the most maligned person in UK politics; I believe someone did a survey of all hate mail (or email?) sent to the House of Commons, and found that a whole third of it was for her alone. I would simply not trust media-informed views of her, unfortunately)
Huh that is very easy to understand. There were two main reasons:
1. Labour had left the government essentially bankrupt, literally leaving the coalition a note that said "there's no money anywhere" iirc. The new government had come in and discovered the finances of the state had been utterly ruined. The numbers were stark and voters had accepted the argument that budget cutbacks were necessary to try and right the ship.
Labour had sort of accepted that this situation was true, but failed to take it seriously. Miliband supposedly had a minor meltdown after he tried to give a long speech without notes, and then realized only afterwards that he'd forgotten the entire section about the deficit. That was the number one issue in British politics at the time!
2. The EU had been building as a bigger and bigger problem over time. Voters were increasingly upset that their concerns on major policy areas like immigration were being systematically ignored by all the major parties, except for the eurosceptic wing of the Tories. Neither Labour nor the mainline Tories nor the Lib Dems wanted to tackle this problem. UKIP came along and started hoovering up votes from both left and right by promising a referendum on the EU. Cameron saw what was happening and decided he could end UKIP, win the election and also crush the eurosceptics by promising an EU referendum he was convinced he could win. That caused a whole lot of voters to abandon UKIP and vote Tory in the correct belief that Cameron would honor his promise. The rest is history.
I didn't know there was a building EU resentment (beyond the stupid stuff I'd heard growing up in the UK). I was living in Europe at the time. It all seems so bizarre.
Resentment against the EU had been building for years due partly to the totally incorrect initial claims made about immigration levels, and then the lack of interest/ability in controlling it. Even voters who weren't that affected by it saw that there were now real issues that affected local people which had effectively been removed from democracy and felt that was wrong. So there was a broad coalition being built by Farage, both the people who cared primarily about immigration levels and wage suppression of the working classes, and also those who cared about the constitutional issue it was exposing.
That's an odd framing of events considering Brown came in midway through 2007. Just before the 2008 GFC.
You make it sound like he went Brown went on a spending spree on a whim ... that isn't what happened. Any increased spending that took place when he became PM was easily within the scope of the UK economy. And considering National Debt was well managed until then (during a time when Brown was Chancellor), your recollection of what happened is wrong.
https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/334/uk-economy/uk-nationa...
And that is exactly the point being made. Brown was in charge when the economy entered a crisis and yet was too left wing to slam the brakes on government spending in response. Voters reacted accordingly.
Do you not remember bailing out the banks?
Emergency stimuli to keep the economy going from recession to depression?
Decreasing tax revenue as the economy entered recession?
And yet, you say Brown was too left wing to slam on the brakes on government spending? ... we would be finished as a nation if you were in charge.
It's just me and you. I'm sure no one else is reading this. So I'll just say. I'm quite confident you have no idea what you're talking about. Either you were too young at the time, no idea how the economy works (especially during a crisis) or ... let's leave it at that.
It doesn't matter why Brown spent so much money. What matters is that after he did so nobody in the Labour hierarchy adjusted to the new reality that they'd spent all the money, and they'd need to implement austerity via large budget cuts to try and reduce the suddenly massive deficit. The Conservatives did realize that, did make that argument, and the voters agreed with them. Which is the point I've been making all along.
BTW it's very rich that in a thread where I'm having to remind people about the issues in an election that only happened 13 years ago, you're claiming I'm too young to remember what happened at the time! The economy, Labour's claims to be competent at it "we have ended boom and bust" etc followed by their Labour's inability to seem serious about the deficit remained an issue for years. Don't you recall Miliband's doomed notes-free speech and his subsequent political exile? That was in 2014. Even years after losing to the coalition, they still didn't want to talk about cutting public sector spending and voters reacted accordingly:
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/sep/24/ed-miliband...
There's an analysis by Labour supporters here:
https://labourlist.org/2010/05/why-labour-lost/
"People stopped trusting the party and they didn’t believe what it said about foreign wars, the state of the economy, reform of Parliament and public spending"
I'm not interested in the politics of why the voters voted they way they did. And your assertions on that are like picking a few leaves off a tree and saying that they are the reason the tree grows.
Your contention was that "Brown was too left wing to slam on the spending brakes".
My contention is that the chart I posted would have looked largely the same whichever party was in power. The only difference would have been the degree and speed of action. And it was this that Conservatives got wrong and which I think that Brown would have done better with. He wasn't a good PM, but he knew what mattered on the economy.
And you can run a clear line from the decisions that were made by the Conservatives at the time to where we are today. The mistakes made (David Cameron with Brexit, Austerity, and now political corruption and malaise) have effectively ruined the potential of Britain for decades to come.
I'm not here to defend Brown, but I do understand the position he was in. Anything else is political garbage.
>> I never understood why Miliband didn't win the 2015 election.
And so this thread is an attempt to explain that, by reference to Labour's legacy of not being willing to reduce public spending.
>> My contention is that the chart I posted would have looked largely the same whichever party was in power.
It might have done, but Brown didn't argue that. In the leadup to 2010 he argued that he would simply not increase it further, in contrast to the "savage cuts" planned by the Tories.
Brown just wasn't charismatic and he made some critical political timing errors. You can have one but you can't have both and he deserved to lose the election.
With the economy, however, he played a blinder and it's under-appreciated. The subsequent clowns have proven that. Brown's mistake was his desire to be PM.
Like you say, a review is a hollow thing.
It's just sexism. From teachers to exams to parents to pop culture, we've decided that women are worse at maths which is obviously both untrue and incredibly damaging. Maybe we should be tackling that.
Coming through an isolated, rural school like this then hitting the real world where the roles are reversed (women are more frequently discriminated against, paid worse) - was a bit of a shock. Note that I didn't suffer at school or anything, it was just sort of accepted that if you were a boy and you wanted to achieve academically you were going against the grain and you were largely on your own.
It is definitely true that as a country the self-deprecating "haha I'm rubbish at maths" attitude is pretty common, I don't whether that is indicative of actual ability or if it's just something people say.
We met when she had her last year in high school, and she was unsure what to do for college or otherwise. She ended up taking a gap year to figure things out. I encouraged her to explore the options, and through a friend found she really wanted to do construction engineering.
To do that, she had to take a year to get some extra math and physics classes.
The start was rough, she had a fear of math and was lacking in basics like algebra. But she was determined to try. Meanwhile I'd been in college for a couple of years and gotten the basic math classes there for my CS degree. I enjoyed math, so tried to help her.
I quickly realized however I had to go back to basics and build some foundations. Back to basics with fractions, basic equation solving etc. After a few weeks of hard work from the both of us, and nearly giving up, things started to fall into place. She started to realized she could understand math, and with that it became a lot more fun.
After a couple of months, it turned out she was actually quite good at math! She picked up new concepts without much struggle, and my help was less and less needed. At the end of the year she passed the exams with high marks, and all I had done to help prepare was just to sit with her and check her answers as she went through previous exams.
Learning maths was fine for me, up to university level.
However I would not make the mistake that this would work for everyone, people do have different strengths. I would not have coped with e.g. Art or Music to that level, and there is no point in forcing maths on people who have those strengths. It's not one-size fits all. Aptitudes do vary and education should lean into that.
All this is to say- Rishi Sunak has literally never in his life had any contact at all with state maths education in this country. This is just one of those weird idiosyncrasies of a guy who has a really strong opinion that maths is important having done absolutely nothing to study the issue.
So what we end up with is a policy where Rishi Sunak plans to make maths education better... whilst massively cutting school budgets. Teachers unions are all voting to strike because he tried to negotiate a pay deal with them that involved them getting a pay rise that had to be funded out of existing school budgets (ie, you can have a pay rise, but it's going to mean you have to turn the central heating off in your schools and stop mending the holes in the roofs). It's just a completely out of touch approach. This new initiative won't touch the sides against the damage childrens eduction will take due to the failure to pay teachers properly.
The state of state maths education in this country is even worse than he thinks.
Having a conversation with any of the 93.6% of the population educated in the state school system qualifies as contact with state maths education
Regarding his background, it's like saying the CEO of the company has no clue about the software that we build because he never fixes the bugs. The job of a Prime Minister of a CEO is not to be in the nitty gritty of the issues, that's the job of the people who work under him just like IC's and Eng Leaders, then they are supposed to bubble up the important issues and explain to him. Having said that, he is best suited as he brings strategic thinking (learned at Goldman, Stanford) to solve these dire problems.
As to what knowledge he brings to the table, the answer is nothing. He's just buddies with the IB establishment. That's why I would vote Starmer despite being right of center, him being positioned ahead of voter desires was unacceptable.
The first part of your sentence above is fine. The second part is not consistent with the record. There have been quite a number of initiatives and programmes to try and improve mathematics in Schools and Colleges over the past 40 years or so in England and Wales.
I think I might need to go digging and put a list up somewhere.
It's not a criticism to say that his background isn't in education, it's an explanation of why he's come up with some weird priority out of the blue and created a solution that no one thinks will work. This isn't about the Prime Minister being the CEO and therefore not needing to worry about the details. A strategic thinker might address the actual issues facing the country rather than blathering about how actors should be forced to learn maths. Should we have interupted Sunak's education to teach him about acting? I think it might have been a good idea, he might have learned to empathize with others a bit rather than coming up with dumb ideas about how every child in Britain needs to be a little Rishi Sunak.
That's clearly nonsense. In a well-run large organisation (which I definitely not saying the UK Government is!) leaders can legitimiately be provided with information that then informs their opinions; they can delegate topics to trusted subordinates to define policy; they can choose to 'sponsor' a topic to give it extra importance, without having done a personal deep-dive into the subject. This is just the reality of leading a large organsation.
Sure; but I didn't say anything to the contrary. I was arguing the opposite: that a leader doesn't need to have direct experience of an issue, to 'sponsor' a related initiative.
> The problem for Sunak is that if you look at his record he's got no junior ministerial experience, no experience on a select committee that's relevant, no record on an all party parliamentary group, not legislative record. He simply has never seriously engaged on this issue, and it's not a serious idea - think about someone with low acheivement in maths GCSE - that student is going to be an immense drain on sources to productively teach maths.
These are all great points, but these aren't the points you were making in your initial post - where you were arguing that he shouldn't be pushing an initiative related to maths education because "Rishi Sunak has literally never in his life had any contact at all with state maths education in this country".
I’m lucky enough to never have been homeless (and I’ve never worked in that area either) but if I was Prime Minister, it’s an area I’d focus on. But… as PM, I’d likely delegate the details to whichever Secretary of State was most logical, and be happy to act as a sponsor, or figurehead.
Does this mean whatever my government did in this would be worthless, and I’d just be being superficial? Not necessarily: the policies and delivery should be judged on their merit, independently of how they were developed or pushed.
This is my point. It doesn’t matter whether Sunak is historically deeply invested in the area - as PM, he’s just supporting something he believes (not incorrectly) is worthwhile. That’s absolutely okay.
The policy itself will have likely been worked in by a plethora of different folk: civil servants, special advisors, domain experts, ministers - and probably least of all Sunak himself.
So judge the content and delivery of the policy on its merits. It may be a terrible policy - but that’s independent of whether the PM is expert or deeply invested in the area.
> Nobody thought to ask me whether I support this policy
My concern is this - there are policy aims, like ending modern slavery or improving maths education (or even just improving the status of maths in the UK), and then there are actual policies. What Sunak is doing here is endorsing a policy in order to achieve a policy aim. But the policy he's endorsing is a policy that will be totally ineffective at achieving that aim.
You're right - ideally the policy would've been worked on by Spads, domain experts, etc. But it wasn't. It was a half-cocked idea that he came up with by himself. How do we know this? The policy is nonsense! No one seriously thinks it will achieve the policy aim, you can't actually endorse a policy that both insists on more maths education and endorse a policy to give maths teachers a massive pay cut.
I understand how this is meant to work, what i'm saying is it very clearly isn't working that way.
However we have a population that have no idea about how things like interest rates work, how loans, mortgages, savings etc work, what pensions do, how to determine if that 2-for-1 deal is better than that separate 50% off deal, the total cost of ownership for a 3 month phone bundled contract vs buying the phone upfront (or with a loan), etc.
None of that is taught in maths. It could be taught in numeracy or finance or some other lesson, it should be taught, but there's a big difference between doing matrix transformations of imaginary numbers and working out that you're being fleeced by Tesco
Unfortunatly people don't have the skills to judge the total cost, or the value, so either listen to one of two extremes of "just buy on finance" vs "never buy on finance"
But one problem is that most of this goes well beyond maths and really becomes more like law.
The worst example perhaps is pensions. The difficult part isn't "how much do I need to invest to get a decent pension?". Its everything else - how much can you contribute? When? How does this change if you have a change in circumstances? What are inheritance rights? Can I move my pension with me if I change job? What protected rights do I have and which of those have value to me? What is the tax position now and when you retire? This is much less about maths and much more about being able to navigate an insanely complicated set of rules built up over about 3 decades of government changing them more or less every year then adding in special case exceptions or saving clauses.