Let’s make this week math week. The IRS has given us a start by inciting a lot of people to pay a lot more attention than usual to numbers. Lets go a step further by paying attention to what the whole business of math education means. The IRS gives another clue. Having tax returns on our minds suggests looking at learning math in terms of income and expenditure – as an investment. Like any good businessman we might ask: How much do we invest in it and what is the return on the investment?

The stunning amount of adding going on this week as people struggle to fill in the blanks might suggest a favorable balance sheet: Whatever math education cost it appears to have generated a lot of action. But this view will not stand up to an audit. The problem is that the skill being exercised in this action is not what was taught in math class or tested by the MEA (Maine Educational Assessment). It’s more like skill at punching buttons on a calculator. Electronic brains, not human brains, are doing all that adding. We have to search further to find more convincing benefits; but first lets get an idea of the size of the investment.

My estimate of the tab to society (which means all of us via taxes) for the total K-12 mathematical learning of a typical Maine citizen is somewhere between $10,000 and $20,000. This is how I figure: If we put the school budget at $5,000 per student per year (which is a little low these days) for 12 years we get a total of $60,000. And if we say that math is one-sixth of school learning we get $10,000 for the lower estimate. But there are other costs. Maybe we should count kindergarten. Surely we should count the cost of educating teachers. And then there is all the money spent by parents. It could easily add up to another 10 grand. So that makes 20 for the upper estimate.

What return justifies this kind of spending? What do we get for it? Once upon a time a substantial return came from the ability to fill out income tax papers, balance checkbooks and make sensible choices at the local store. But today a $10 calculator does most of such stuff better. Pretending that this kind of thing is a justification for school math has worse consequences than poor social accounting. One of these is shown by the following extracts from an interview with a fifth-grader who was explaining why she didn’t trust her teachers: “I asked why we have to learn this math. She said grownups need it in the supermarket … but I always go with my Mom and I see that nobody there does any math themselves. It’s all done by the machines. Why do teachers have to lie to us? ”

Don’t get me wrong. I am a mathematician by profession and think that mathematics is one of the most beautiful creations of the human mind. I am certainly not against it. What upsets me is that forcing children to learn obsolete mathematics is not only a waste of time and money, but worse still – far, far worse – it undermines children’s trust and confidence in school. Nothing could be more costly to society.

What would be a better kind of math education? One good outcome would be developing the habit of looking at the quantitative side of everything. My semi-serious semi-fun calculation of investment costs is an example of mathematician-think. Another is my response to seeing signs under the golden arches proclaiming that “billions and billions” of hamburgers have been sold. I don’t have any way of knowing how many they actually sold. But I can’t stand not knowing whether numbers are plausible – is a billion a really big number for sales of hamburgers by a national chain? It would be very big in my bank account, but is it big in this context? So I scrounge around in my head for relevant bits of knowledge. Aha! You can think of the population of America as close enough to a quarter billion so that a billion hamburgers is just four per person – not at all a big number for a national chain. On the other hand a trillion … well, I’ll leave that to you.

Is skill at this kind of thinking a good return on the investment of $20,000? If it is confined to hamburgers, obviously not. But it can also be used as a protection against being seduced by a politician’s promise of what sounds like a big tax cut or an employer’s promise of what sounds like a big incentive package. The range of such uses might well add to more than $20,000 in direct benefits. But an even greater benefit of this broader view of mathematics comes from the opportunities it opens for us – grandparents, parents, teachers, everyone – to talk to the children in our lives about the quantitative aspects of the world.

Seymour Papert is professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a Distinguished Computer Scientist at the University of Maine and a member of Maine Learning Technology Task Force. He may be contacted at Papert@midmaine.com.