Education Shortform
Numeracy (and Literacy)
In a nutshell…
N is for numeracy, or rather for a numeracy & literacy combo (also wryly called the ‘3 Rs’: reading, writing and arithmetic). Internationally, these are the skills that school systems everywhere seem to want to promote above all others.
This is nothing new, of course, but the emphasis is as strong — or perhaps stronger — than ever.
Numeracy and literacy are assessed and compared globally via ‘PISA’ tests; the triannual release of these results has a real political impact, with high scores on PISA seen by some as the gold standard of a well-performing education system.
On some level, this preoccupation makes a certain sense; you can’t do other subjects, for example science or politics, without having good numeracy and literacy skills. They are needed for tasls like reading or data handling.
However, the way that English qualifications are prioritised over other subjects could be seen as quite arbitrary, given that many such qualifications include the study of literature that is rather less fundamental or transferrable to other disciplines.
Is studying Shakespeare more fundamental than knowing about the periodic table, for example?
Feel free to share your thoughts on numeracy and literacy. Do you think that Mathematics and English should be mandatory school subjects? And is there anything else that is equally important?
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This is one of a series of shortform education articles. You can download a simplified summary of my ‘A–Z of Educational concepts’ here.
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