An education policy that hankers for the past and pursues the downright trivial

For anyone who saw it, wasn’t that a great story about UK School Minister Nick Gibb being asked what eight times nine makes during a TV interview on the Good Morning Britain programme?

Why was he being asked? Gibb wants to introduce testing of multiplication table knowledge in eight and nine-year olds throughout England. There is a hankering after such traditional – you might say outdated – forms of school learning among many in Conservative circles.

The wet dream of Tory education ministers
Perfectly useless as a means to develop mathematical skill

Gibb’s answer to the question?

I’ve learned through bitter experience never to answer these kinds of questions on live television.

In other words, he wasn’t confident that he knew the answer. Which, as the interviewer Kate Garraway pointed out, hadn’t stopped him becoming a government minister. His answer that eight and nine-year olds wouldn’t be asked such questions on live TV was glib but a cop out: they’re not paid ministerial salaries either.

In any case, this nostalgic longing for rote learning is entirely misplaced. It’s true that I sometimes smile at the slowness of shop staff in calculating change. If the till doesn’t tell them, or they don’t have a calculator to work it out, they often find it difficult to decide such problems as what change from a £5 note to give me for £3.89’s worth of purchases.

But who cares? They do have a till machine or a calculator, and either is likely to be more accurate than their calculations. It takes much the same time to use either of those devices as to do the mental arithmetic. In any case, the calculation doesn’t require knowledge of a multiplication table.

Besides which, this is all so trivial. What if they got it wrong and I didn’t spot the error? The total sum at stake is £1.11. Who cares? As a general rule, I’d prefer correct change, but when all’s said and done, I’m far more likely to do more damage to my finances myself, through some ill-considered purchase, than the maximum I could lose through this calculation being carried out incorrectly.

Certainly, this isn’t worth a major national initiative and inflicting more boredom and pain on children.

What’s far worse is that multiplication table exams only test children’s memory, the least interesting part of mathematical ability.

Here’s what I’d like a child (or a government minister) to do, if they can’t remember what eight times nine makes.

At the simplest level, they might say, “I know what eight times ten makes, because that’s easy – it’s eighty. And nine times is just ten times less one time, so the answer must be 80 – 8.”

Or, if the child had mastered some of the earlier entries in the multiplication table, they might say, “well, four times nine is thirty-six, so eight times nine must be just twice that, which isn’t hard to work out.”

A really clever child who knew some of the multiplication table, but not the row for eight, might say, “8 is just 4 x 2, and 9 is 3 x 3, so I’m trying to work out 4 x 2 x 3 x 3, or 4 x 3 x 2 x 3, which is six twelves, and I know the answer to that.”

To be honest, if the child took that last approach but got the answer wrong, I’d be inclined to give the work a good mark. The reasoning is so good, and it demonstrates a knowledge of factorisation (you can split numbers into simpler components) and of the commutative nature of multiplication (you can multiply numbers in any order and the result is the same). Reasoning is far more useful to mathematics than simply getting the right result – which we can obtain more reliably from the ubiquitous calculator (hey, they’re even on our phones).

Surely that’s more useful than simply parroting “72”? As Nick Gibb apparently wouldn’t. Or couldn’t.

An anecdote about Einstein recounts that a student once asked him what the speed of sound was. Einstein replied that he didn’t clutter up his memory with such information, but instead made sure he knew how to find it. I think even Nick Gibb would have trouble denying that Einstein was pretty good at maths, despite his aversion to burdening his brain through rote learning.

I’m assuming that Gibb has heard of Einstein, though he might well deny it on live TV, as a self-protective measure.

To misquote Oscar Wilde, a Tory government chasing the mirage of a reversion to traditional education policy, is merely the uninspired in pursuit of the undesirable.