I am a professor of physics at Oxford University. I read your report (8 March) about all of the basic maths, science and English that adults have forgotten after we have left school. You can imagine the sinking feeling in my gut when I saw that the concept in statistics of a “mode” was mentioned and I realised that I had no idea what the article was talking about! In my field we live and breathe statistics, how could I possibly not know what a “mode” was?! (I confess I was far less concerned that my understanding of the uses of a semi-colon were, let’s say, fuzzy.)
So I spent five seconds and typed “mode” into a search engine, where I discovered that I perfectly well knew what the “mode” was. It is the most probable value. Basically, the top of the bell curve if you had that distribution, or the highest point.
But what is most important here is that I knew where I needed to go to find the information. “Learning” a series of disjointed facts is not really a sign of education but a sign of a good memory. An education is what you need in order to be able to find, disseminate and then use information in areas where you are not familiar. While I applaud the memory skills of those who remember the details of “mitosis” many decades after they encountered it at school (another five seconds reminds me that it is the point in replication of a cell where the chromosomes split into identical copies), surely it is of far greater import to be able to find that information and then to critically assess its veracity and value.
Even where basic maths is concerned, it is more important, as an adult, to know what the operation of multiplication does to numbers, and when it is appropriate to use it, than to be able to spend many minutes performing a complicated operation that a machine can do instantly.
• The fact that a large proportion of adults have forgotten what they were taught at school clearly demonstrates that a large proportion of what is taught in schools is completely pointless. How many adults have ever needed to find a square root? Why on earth does anyone need to know what an oxymoron is? Most people manage their lives perfectly well without such knowledge.
Children should be encouraged to study what interests them, and not forced to learn material that seems incomprehensible. Otherwise the phrase “useful education” will become an oxymoron.
South Brent, Devon
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