Maths to 18? That will put parents through torture

What in the name of Euclid was the Chancellor thinking, even hinting that mathematics should be compulsory until the age of 18?

There has since been hasty retraction, possibly because Education Secretary Nicky Morgan was surrounded by outraged parents waving pitchforks and burning torches made of pages hysterically torn from Isaac Newton’s Principia.

Here’s the thing; mathematicians, like artists, are born – not made. You can bully children through the 11-plus, flog them into a half-decent GCSE grade, but to extend the algebraic torture any further is inhumane. To them and to us.

I have a vested interest, in that over the past six months I have held my 13-year-old’s hands tightly and solemnly promised her that just two more years of maths and she can consign her cosine to the proverbial dustbin.

It’s not true, of course. She loves geography and science but that’s maths in its natural habitat, camouflaged in demographic shifts and slyly hidden among chemical valences and velocity to mass ratios. Meanwhile, the seven year- old thinks maths is fun and easy, so I agree as emphatically as I can, in the hope she can eventually sort my pension out for me.

Maths matters. Even for the curious amateur there is much to cheer. In January a new prime number running to 22,338,618 digits was discovered. Yay!

And I couldn’t possibly begin to explain how, but this very week the £500,000 Abel prize (the Nobel of mathematics) was finally awarded to Oxford Professor Andrew Wiles for his “stunning proof ” of Fermat’s Theorum. Double yay squared!

A mathematician friend asserts with genuine passion that God – if it can be proven that he exists – is a mathematician, such is the divine flawlessness of his numerically harmonious universe.

I would hesitate to say I enjoy maths but I can appreciate and admire its elegance; in my early teens I was blown away by the Fibonacci sequence that dictates the way leaves grow in a spiral round a vertical stem so they all receive light. A decade later and I was transfixed by the infinite Mandelbrot set fractals made famous (notorious) for their use in Acid House graphics. And can anyone truly assert, after the banking collapse and global crisis of 2008, that the geeks haven’t inherited the earth?

Everything we do, from renewing insurance to using a dating app or plagiarising an essay on Justinian’s Balkan Wars is predicated on number wizardry and the smooth functioning of algorithms. In which case I ought to be lobbying for maths instruction up to A-level, right?

I might be persuaded, but only if it’s applied, not pure, and “mathematics” is a synonym for “useful stuff you can apply in real life, even when you don’t work at the Large Hadron Collider”.

By this I mean teaching young people how to read a list of wildly differing mortgage deals and grasp the differences. And then explaining if to me. If the coursework involved learning to respect – and ultimately fear – credit card APR rates and the evils of store cards I’d be happy make my children buckle down.

And I would be eminently grateful if there were a module entitled “How to pick up a selfassessment income tax form and not feel tearful and or mildly nauseous”.

So it looks like a tentative “maybe” from me to practical mathematics at school. And who knows, with so many young minds applying themselves, we might finally discover an elegant, stunning solution to boom, bust and educating our children for the 21st century.