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I was never good at math. I still wake up in the middle of the night sometimes after nightmares involving my many math tests. But perhaps advocating Maharashtra government’s decision to make mathematics optional after standard 8 for the reasons above will make me look vain. So I will seek some more educated answers.

The average high-school goer in India is a curious mix of conflicting ambitions. He even likes (gasp!) school sometimes. This is because most of the horror stories he was told as a pre-schooler about schools being torture houses and teachers being demons (who spreads these things I wonder) have proven themselves wrong by this time. He has favourite subjects (sometimes one of them is even math), and many a time nurses fond dreams of making a career out of them.

He persevers in his pursuit of better grades in the face of an overflowing schedule (tuitions, curriculars etc). He is secretly guilty of his ineptitude with the numerical and does his best to measure up to his more gifted peers. He spends hours struggling with the well established rote system. Hours that may have proved more gainful if employed in practice of things he enjoys more. Say… literature, or drawing, or music.

(In the long run, many say, these lost hours also block out a lot of less fashionable career options, but that’s not the point being discussed here.)

I am not undermining math. I am sure those that have done India proud never had to struggle with math. On the other hand, there are many whose time with the subject went waste. They spend the entire impressionable half of their life trying to measure up. Everyone just isn’t the same. And everyone shouldn’t be the same.

In King Arthur’s time a court poet was… well… something. A skilled metal worker on the other hand hardly ever found mention outside the smithy. Today, they are engineers. A poet is more of a hobbyist (heavens help them if he chooses to do it full time). It is a time and age thing. The study of math and more precise sciences, has come to mean a set career path that usually ends up with one taking up a career in the technical realm or ‘die trying’.

Maybe in some years when I get the hang of the parental viewpoint, I will find myself opposing such moves (stranger things have happened), but I am not waiting for that time.

Posted on Saturday, April 29th, 2006 at 11:34 am and filed under learning, news.

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