I've also been concerned for a long time -- perhaps even longer -- about
another American educational problem: in addition to their general
ignorance about language, Americans are much more than usually confused
(and, I think, frightened) about mathematics. Indeed,
they boast about it:
In any event, in an equally Quixotic attempt to do something useful
about this problem, I've been teaching a series of what I
call "Math Appreciation" courses over the years in the UM's Residential
College. Just as a Music Appreciation course
doesn't aim to make a musician of you, but rather tries to help you
understand why musicians do what they do, and why they think so highly
of it, a Math Appreciation course is not intended to produce more
mathematicians and still more failures, but rather to teach what
mathematics really is, what it's been (history is rather
important, after all), and what it's becoming. Most of
all, it tries to show the fun parts of math, the weird and crazy and
startling parts, the truly magnificent parts that burst on you like
Beethoven's version of Schiller. For that purpose, I've
found no better organizing source than Hofstadter's Gödel,
Escher, Bach, and that's the name and the principal text of the course I'm
currently teaching.
"Math was never
my best subject"
"Oh, I'm no good at
math"
"Never could do that stuff"
etc. In fact, it is socially acceptable in our culture
to be mathematically illiterate; to experience the awesome stupidity of
this attitude, merely substitute words referring to some subject
Americans are willing to take seriously (sex, for instance) in these
disclaimers and imagine how likely they are. Perhaps if
we were left to pick it up on the streets like sex, we might take math
more seriously; or perhaps if it were taught as if it were an activity
that human beings could indulge in with pleasure, it might do a bit
better.