So there's a survey making the rounds

[conuly]

wherein people were asked if kids should be taught Arabic numerals (also known as the numbers we use in our day-to-day lives) and they said no.

This definitely proves a degree of mathematical ignorance among American adults. It doesn't, however, prove that mathematical ignorance correlates with Islamophobia, xenophobia, or any related condition. Many of those same individuals would probably have also said that children shouldn't be taught base 10 numerals or positional notation either - "Just teach the kids plain math like I learned!" - and, in fact, many of those folks do rail against the teaching of place value, not understanding that YES they were taught this in school and NO you cannot understand basic arithmetic using our number system without it. (It would be interesting, as a control, to see what the answers were if asked if children should be taught Roman numerals. Then again, those of us who know what they are might say no, don't bother!)

Note: I'm not saying that this particular ignorance does NOT correlate with that particular bigotry, just that the question, bare like that, doesn't prove it.

Comments

[imhilien]

I should be surprised, but I'm not. :( Lots of mathematics are Arabic in origin, anyway - algebra, algorithms. Anything with 'al' in front of it.

Also coffee.

[conuly]

No, the way you can tell a Klatchian is, you look an' see if he uses a lot of words beginning with “al”, right? 'Cos that's a dead giveaway. They invented all the words starting with “al”. That's how you can tell they're Klatchian. Like al–cohol, see?"

[pauamma]

I think I saw that survey (or one of those surveys) and wondered whether they meant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_numerals or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Arabic_numerals.

[conuly]

I actually learned the other one in high school, in world history.

Which just goes to show that both you and I are not the target audience of this poll, either to be mocked or to shake our heads sadly while secretly doing the mocking.

[hilarita]

I thought that as well. It was a silly poll.

[shy_magpie]

It rather reminds me of when a smartass at my school did a survey asking if we supported women's suffrage, only he got some ESL kids to do the actual questioning and even those of us who knew the word weren't sure if the kids meant to say suffering or suffrage. Like the survey you described, it smacks more of trying to embarrass people for not knowing the word than proving anything.

If you were trying to prove Islamophobia in education I'd look into how many teachers are told to stick to the subject when teaching about Pythagoras vs Muhammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī (the Muslim scholar who literally wrote the book on Algebra). As much time as I spent hearing about that cult, only a passing reference was made to the fact that there even were Muslim scholars much less that we could trace much of what we were learning back to them. Guess which one got a parent complaint.

[kengr]

Back in junior high someone came up with a neat trick.

You walk up to someone and ask if they'd like a five-dollar bill. When they said yes, you hand them a piece of paper that says "You owe me $5"

[rhoda_rants]

I took a class in Eastern religion in college, and everything was groovy when we were talking Tao and Buddhism and Hindu, but when she got to Islam? ~YIKES.~ She made it suuuuuuper obvious how awful and misogynistic she thought it was, like every other culture ever doesn't have problems with how it treats women. It was . . . disappointing.

[shy_magpie]

Its bad enough when its coming from the students or parents like in the previously described scenarios, you'd think a teacher would be able to at least get they aren't supposed to be passing on their bias.

[rhoda_rants]

Yeah. She had ahem quite a few biases she was not shy about sharing. I still learned a lot, because there was a lot of independent reading involved, but it was frustrating.

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[conuly]

I don't want to guess.

[rhoda_rants]

This reminds me of that Penn & Teller episode where they were going around getting people to sign a fake petition to ban "bi-hydrogen oxide"--aka H2O, aka water. It was allegedly about raising awareness not to sign stuff if you don't actually know what it's for, but it also came across as very, "Look how much smarter we are than these ignorant sheeple!"

Another thing that's been bugging me is this "Americans suck at geography! And that makes them racist!" thing I've seen going around--not recently, but with some frequency in the past few years. I do, in fact, suck at geography, especially if you tell me to guess which of these four places all starting with the letter 'G' are in which countries and where to find them on a map. It comes from a similar place, I think. But also I'm just dyslexic, and could you not make me feel worse about it?

[redbird]

Sometimes it feels finicky--it doesn't matter that I know what the capital of Florida is--and sometimes it feels like a reminder that maybe schools should spend at least a little time on geography. That was my reaction to the report, some years ago, that said 45% of Americans surveyed couldn't think of "a country near the Pacific Ocean." (The reporting on that didn't feel like "therefore Americans are ignorant" so much as "when did you last look at a map of either the world, or the United States?")

But that may be pandering to my biases: as far as I can tell, at least where I lived, geography was mostly dropped from the elementary school curriculum a few years after I learned it there. "Name all the countries in South America" isn't a big deal (though I still can); knowing what "Latin America" means, and that not everyone there speaks Spanish and almost none of them speak Latin, feels like it matters. But that in turn leads into "know what you don't know": the difference between knowing the official languages of Paraguay, and not assuming that one of them is Latin.

I think there's also a pressure not to say "I don't know/I have no opinion," so people will say either "yes" or "no" to something like "should the U.S. admit Elbonian immigrants?" based on either their general opinion about immigration, or on assumptions ranging from "place I never heard of, they must be uneducated" to "oh dear, another place I never heard of, is there a disaster I missed reading about?" to Calvin Trillin's idea that every new wave of immigration means Americans get to try a new cuisine. If I didn't recognize that "Elbonia" was an imaginary country made-up by Scott Adams, I might say "sure" to that question because I don't think categorically banning immigrants from anywhere is a good idea. And if I did I would either say "come on, you're pulling my leg" (and be written down as "no opinion" because they wouldn't have a category for "and 12 percent of the people surveyed recognized that this was a trick question) or "why not, I don't think there are a lot of them" because "all the prospective immigrants from Elbonia" is none.

[rhoda_rants]

Yeah, I remember having to memorize a lot of stuff by rote, (and also that amazing Animaniacs song), and then forgetting most of it once I passed the test. So pretty much how I got by in a lot of math classes. That might say a lot about our approach to education right there, the tendency to make kids memorize stuff by rote. I don't know if it's still that way, but that's how I was taught for certain categories. (History and remembering names and dates had a similar problem.)

Then again, I could draw a somewhat accurate map of Middle Earth from memory, and give you a decent run-down of the ruling fiefdoms and their lineage, so maybe it's not the topic, it's just that it goes boring once it's in a school setting. shrug

I think there's also a pressure not to say "I don't know/I have no opinion," so people will say either "yes" or "no" to something like "should the U.S. admit Elbonian immigrants?" This is a really good point. I feel enormous pressure to either have a stance on something, or not admit ignorance. It feels like a trap either way. I'd like to pretend I'd be savvy and ask for more information, like, "Elbonian? Where are they from? What's happening in their country?" But realistically, I'd probably just snarl at anyone with a clipboard to leave me alone, because I hate public surveys, lol.

It'd be interesting to see what the numbers were if they did include people who were obviously in on the joke, or figured it out.

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[thekumquat]

One of the most useful classes I ever had was probably the one where a hung-over teacher ordered us all to be silent and gave out copies of an article about the horrors of DHMO (dihydrogen monoxide). And then started a debate about whether it should be better regulated.

The meme that used to go round here was "Americans are so insular that only 11% of them have passports" - back when Americans could travel to Canada, Mexico and most of the Caribbean using a drivers license and ignoring how much travel you can do within the USA...

[rhoda_rants]

DIHYDROGEN MONOXIDE! That's why I was trying to think of. Dang it! That's what I get for commenting before coffee. See, because the "monoxide" part sounds scary, which is why it's so deceptive.

And yeah, if you're on the coast or in one of the middle states, you don't really need a passport unless you're trying to cross oceans. I have traveled a lot personally, but that's a privilege. It's key that people understand that on top of the "lol, Americans never leave America" thing.

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[conuly]

It's not like people in places where the average knowledge of geography is greater are all ever so free from bigotry anyway.

[rhoda_rants]

Very true! It's a strange--but quick and easy--way to "prove" ignorance, I guess.

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[hudebnik]

Some late-night talk show host (I forget which one) did a bunch of vox-pop interviews asking how people felt about Obamacare, and how they felt about the Affordable Care Act. Not surprisingly, they were more positive on the latter than the former. The difference probably would have been even greater if he hadn't been taking the survey on the streets of New York City.

[divinemusings]

I've seen some of the answers to that question though, and those answers were full of horrible things. -_- Not all, some were just ignorant "but our numbers our fine!" I also wonder what the sampling is of the people being asked this. Most individuals I know are aware of that we already use Arabic numerals, so I can't help but wonder if certain demographics are being asked on purpose to skew the results... But I always wonder that kind of thing with polls, lol.

[zesty_pinto]

To be fair, while I think you have a valid point, I also feel like it's a graduation of a previous survey...

[conuly]

We SHOULD bomb Agrabah, the asthetics make no sense.

[zesty_pinto]

Awww, you're going to make Will Smith genie even more blue.

[thewayne]

There was a recent study released about X number of species was going to die if global warming didn't change, a late night comedian sent out an intern to do street interviews asking if we should save homo sapiens. One woman swore that she actually saw one in the wild!

Personally, I'm not very much in favor of saving homo sapiens. I think they had a pretty good run, but as a race, they're clearly not very intelligent or evolved.

[conuly]

I've seen several homo sapiens in the wild.

[silveradept]

You can pull that particular routine on anyone by using its technical terminology on an audience that would know lay terms for what's going on. People who know those things will respond differently than people who know those things, but not by those names.

There are plenty of valid ways to measure how xenophobic and ignorant the population is without having to resort to terminology trickery.