“No matter your business, you cannot stay still for any length of time or your competitors will scratch and claw all over you.” That’s how Home Depot co-founder Arthur Blank described life in the real, ruthless world of commerce.
Please contemplate Blank’s dose of reality alongside all the pearl-clutching from the education-obsessed over a new study showing that one out of eight University of California, San Diego (UCSD) freshmen “have math skills ‘that fall below middle-school level.’” According to an editorial in the Wall Street Journal that covered the recent analysis, “California started down the slippery slope of declining standards by dropping algebra as a requirement for eighth-graders” in 2013. Oh no! What will we do?
Memory says that back in the 1960s when angry Cal-Berkeley students informed Governor Reagan that they were the future, the eternal optimist archly quipped “sell bonds.” One guesses that more than fifty years later, more than a few Americans perpetually invested in the notion of American decline will use this latest bit of “bad news” to yet again sell bonds, stocks, not to mention all sorts of commentary from dyspeptic conservatives convinced that this time really is different, that America’s best days are in the rear-view mirror owing to schools mothballing algebra instruction, kids not learning algebra, or some nation-threatening combination of both. Crisis is oxygen for the pundit class.
Better for readers to just relax, and turn the bad news on its head. Paraphrasing Calvin Coolidge, a conservative who was a bit less emotional than the modern crop, let this “crisis” fall into the proverbial ditch.
What’s firstly interesting about the algebra-related handwringing is that conservatives are supposed to believe in markets as information personified. Okay, but people are the markets. Perhaps we trust them more? Let’s do so confident that human action is telling us things about the present and the future.
Considering all this through the prism of math skills broadly, and algebra understanding specifically, it’s certainly possible that declines in both are a bullish market signal that much of the alleged knowledge foisted on countless generations of Americans no longer has relevance to individual achievement or prosperity. Which is something to embrace when it’s remembered that progress is defined not by what we know, but by what we no longer need to know. Think commerce to grasp the previous truth.
It wasn’t terribly long ago in an historical sense that agricultural skills were more than necessary to feed, clothe and shelter oneself. Implied in the Industrial Revolution was that skills with one's hands gave individuals a leg up. Words-per-minute typing and handwriting skills were perfectly reasonable questions posed to job applicants quite a bit more modernly. In 2025, none are relevant. Good. Individuals and businesses won’t be long for this world, and certainly won’t remain prosperous, if they’re doing as they’ve always done.
Despite this happy truth about the meaning of learning and relevant skills, the pundit class and academics talking their books continue to key on grasp of ancient knowledge as somehow predictive of what’s ahead. It’s not serious, and it becomes even less serious when readers look back on their lives and remember that studies showing declining American student aptitude go back many decades, and likely many generations. Yet the U.S. has progressed economically and technologically despite precisely because economic progress is all about relentlessly putting the past out to pasture.
Returning to Blank, “if you don’t change, you’re a dead duck.” So much meaning in so few words, much of it mocking pundit alarmism about what’s no longer relevant, and probably never was. The scandal isn’t algebra illiteracy, it’s that schools still teach it in the first place.
