Apparently, some urban elementary schools now encourage their 12-year-old students to “go out for lunch,” that is, to get together in small groups and go out to purchase their lunchtime meal at a nearby downtown restaurant.
When I first heard this, I was surprised, and my first thoughts were critical. “Should schools be encouraging consumerism?” I wondered. Should they be recommending salty, fatty restaurant food? Should they be pushing such young students downtown? Should they be stigmatizing students who have little access to money? My further reflections moved me in a different direction, however.
When I was such a young person, I traveled around town freely. Both on my own or with friends, I grew quite familiar with my neighbourhood and with the downtown, and I had plenty of experience conducting business in stores. Young people today, however, appear to me to be much more restricted in their movements and activities, hardly having the opportunity to develop the skills of self-reliant engagement with the urban environment, and it is probably good that they are being encouraged to develop these skills.
One particular area of the non-self-reliance of these young people seems especially noteworthy. Many, it seems to me, have little experience with money, and do not have the quick skills necessary for purchasing: they are not experienced in the interactions (and don’t really know what to expect or how to act) and they don’t know how to calculate change. (This inability is pointedly reflected back and reinforced by many behind the counter who rely on electronic cash registers to tell them what change to give.)
For myself, I can’t imagine a life without facility with number. Our lives are intensely quantified at every level from personal issues of making change at a store, paying a service charge at the ATM and reading the number of calories or grams of sugar in a packaged food produce, to the larger social and cultural issues of mortgage rates, national budgets, unemployment figures, votes for the governing parties, and immigration limits. So much important information is communicated through numbers, and we are crippled at every one if these levels if we cannot easily understand the significance of these numbers with which we are confronted. –And, further, our ignorance can be easily manipulated by others who deploy their numbers misleadingly.
In Book VI of Plato’s Republic, Socrates talks of the importance of education in mathematics. Mathematics is important for the sorts of reasons I’ve just given, to be sure, but, he argues, it is also important for even more serious reasons. Mathematics is an engagement with formative structures of reality that are abstract, universal and necessary. Mathematical structures are abstract in the sense that they don’t care about anything empirical: three plus five is eight, regardless of what the three or the five things are. Such structures are universal because they apply to any and every situation, any and every three or five. They are necessary because they are the structures that must characterize anything if it is going to count as “real”–anything that is must act in accordance with these principles, regardless of its specific circumstances. Here we see the deeper significance of mathematics, beyond its practical value for dealing with everyday calculations of quantity: education in mathematics is primarily important because it introduces us to the domain of the necessary grounds that underlie empirical life.
When we study math, we learn to look beyond the immediate and to recognize that the immediate itself already answers to grounds and causes that are not immediately evident. Studying mathematics is thus the beginning of the study of the “invisible” causes of things, the beginning of the attitude that doesn’t just stop at the “that” but asks, as Aristotle says, for the “why.”
I mentioned earlier the 12-year-olds and the cashiers who cannot on their own “do the math” required for their simple financial transactions. But truly “doing the math” goes much deeper. To understand our finances, to understand the economics of the downtown, is a deep matter of studying causes, of studying the powers that are deployed behind and through the simple everyday transactions in which we are engaged.
Socrates enjoins us to study these deeper causes. Our studies should be mathematical until we have it as virtually “second nature” to look past the immediate and understand what deeper reality is insinuating itself into our lives through this immediate.
I am always a bit surprised and dismayed with the cashier who cannot make simple change. I am even more shocked, though, by the educated adult who buys bottled water, gives money to the established “charities” whose attractive young agents solicit donations on the street, shops at malls, or votes for “budget-cutting” candidates.
Can you do the math?
One Comment
John, my 12 year old son has a fair bit of freedom and gets around town pretty well however we like to know where he is as often as possible. He is not the best at making change etc. but I think while I have tried to be supportive with math homework etc. I have also downplayed the importance of money. He doesn’t have an allowance and money is rarely a topic of discussion in our house. Nice Blog!!
btw, I don’t buy bottled water. ha.
tim