How our phones make us dumber

Should children be made to learn their times tables? This debate has been raging this week, with teachers and teaching unions rubbishing the Government’s plans to make children do more rote learning.

Then there was the humiliating interview on ITV’s Good Morning Britain in which Schools Minister Nick Gibb refused to answer questions on times tables.

Ah ha! Clearly the policy must be rubbish, as the minister himself doesn’t even know his times tables, everyone laughed.

Well, I don’t find it a laughing matter, because, to my great shame, I still don’t really know my times tables.

It’s a lasting legacy of my mediocre primary school, where, in the Eighties, the hippy head didn’t like the idea of children being made to learn.

Instead, we did projects that would last for weeks on daft topics such as ‘ties’. The idea was that school should be about ‘ exploring’. Rubbish. All it achieved was woefully to prepare me for secondary school.

While as an 11-year- old, not having to do proper maths classes was great, it also meant I never learned the basic language of mathematics — and I’ve struggled ever since.

At secondary school, I was put in the bottom stream for maths and it took me years to catch up. Even now, despite having studied statistics at degree level, it’s still a weakness because I lack key foundations such as times tables. And it’s embarrassing struggling to do even basic arithmetic without a calculator.

But there are other reasons why rote learning is important. When, one summer, I worked in a particularly bleak nursing home, I set myself the task of memorising a poem each day. I still remember them now — and if ever I’m having a difficult time, I have those words of wisdom at hand to remind me that I’m not alone.

Many people will say that in the age of mobile phones — with their calendars, address books and reminders — there is no point in memorising things. Psychologists call this ‘cognitive offloading’.

But what’s interesting is that when we rely on phones and the internet for complex things, research shows we end up relying on them for simple things, too.

And this is making us dumber: it can stop us thinking for ourselves. There’s evidence that we’re also losing our focus and attention, so our memory is suffering too.

So, yes, it’s boring having to memorise times tables — but it teaches the brain how to retain and manipulate information. And that is precisely what we should be teaching in our schools.