Whither Numeracy?

Numeracy, a term akin to literacy, was coined by Prof. John Allen Paulos, Math professor at Temple University in the US in his excellent book, Innumeracy. Innumeracy meens Math illiteracy. In day to day life, we come across several instances of innumeracy and I am not joking. Let me share my personal experiences over last few years in our own India and in Chennai no less, which claims to have a long tradition of math excellence. Interviewing over the last 8 to 10 years, over 400 well qualified young people between the ages of 21 and 35 years, I have come across several such cases. The qualifications range from Engineering degrees, accountancy (CA, ICWA), MBAs in HR, Purchasing, Sales and Marketing, and so on. You can imagine a vast majority would be engineers considering that I am in the Manufacturing business. One of my favourite questions to them in the early minutes of the interview is ask them to state their height in centimeters and convert that to inches and then to feet. I simply ask them to do the traditional method of multiplication and division with a paper and pencil. Many of them instantly pull out their mobiles and try to use the calculator feature. When I tell them that they would have to use the manual method, they normally look peeved but being a job interview, start off grudgingly. And the result? Surprisingly 90 to 95 people out 100 don't get it right!!! They simply cannot multiply leave alone divide........ and we are talking qualified young engineers here mostly. This is also across economic strata or communities from which these people come from and hence these other extraneous factors do not seem to matter at all. It is truly an across- the- nation problem. And Prof. Paulos says the same is true in the US. He sees so much of innumeracy everywhere that it shocks him. Author Malcolm Gladwell, in his recent book, Outliers, says math needs a lot of hard work and some cultures that have a tradition of hard work excel in math as a result. He specifically speaks of centuries of rice farming in East Asian cultures as a reason for math excellence in those countries. Apparently, if one has to be a successful rice farmer, one needs to rise before dawn at least 360 days in a year and toil hard for hours in his rice field. This kind of rigour, dedication and hard work is what it takes to become proficient in math. More about that later. So why does it take human beings so much of effort to learn math? It is my sense that we have to look for answers many millions of years down the road as to how we human beings evolved as a species. It is my view that if at all only addition(adding numbers) comes naturally to people followed by multiplication but with a bit more trouble (This is because multiplication is repetitive addition so it is a logical next, I guess). That brings us to subtraction.... and that's where the trouble egins....... Do you remember when you first tried subtracting when you were a little kid. It was a mess, right? And what about Division...... Forget it.... May be because it is in a way sequential and repetitive subtraction. Remember your dad's exhortations when you started to do subtractions... would tell you to always cross-check the answer by an addition! "Add the number you just subtracted with the answer you got and see if you get the bigger number", he would say. He said something similar when you first learnt to divide. He asked you to multiply the divisor and the quotient and add the remainder to check if you get the dividend, right? If this is so difficult, what about percentages, fractions, algebra and probabilities...... That's highway to hell, right...... Why is it so? Intuitively everything looks easy enough but when you start to do it with pencil and paper, it is another ball game !! Why? Because addition came naturally to human beings as they evolved and survived in the prehistoric wilderness (have no doubts on this because all of our ancestors had a pretty good knack of survival and that is why we are alive and around today, (right?) Let me explain..... Humans were unique animals in many ways and one important difference that made them stand out from other animals was that they could stand or walk upright on two limbs, freeing up the other two limbs to do several things, among others, fight for survival. Also, living as groups, they could take on several threats, mostly from other animals and use their free limbs to hold weapons. The weapons started out as loose pebbles and stones to pieces of wood and finally to more refined weaponry. In spite of this advantage, human beings had to make a fundamental decision each time they faced a threat in the vast open expanses of the prehistoric ages and that was the decision of fight or flight. And humans made this decision each day or hour or minute by a simple rule - by adding up the numbers on his side quickly and the numbers on the other (could be number of tigers, lions, wolves or even other humans or cannibals). If he found the number on his side greater, he stood his ground and fought, else he ran for his life like there was no tomorrow. And this must have gone on for millions of years..... and thus he learnt to add each day or minute of his life. But.... but... he never learnt to subtract, may be because it would have been traumatic!!! Imagine one of his mates getting eaten by some wild animal in front of his eyes. Don't think subtraction's going to be on top his mind..... We can laugh about it today because we know it has a happy ending and he survived, procreated and thrived eventually up to this day without really leaning to subtract naturally. I could go on and on and speak about how humans can't figure out scale, momentum or magnitude of things and as a consequence why they can't figure percentages or probabilities but that's got to wait till next time.