My remarks about math last week caused quite a few people to stop me in the corridors at Orono and even in the local drug store to strike up a conversation that eventually came round to admitting (or were they boasting?) that they “can’t do math.” The number of ways they express this (I don’t have a head for figures … I’m not mathematically minded … and so on) indicates that not being able to do math is an important part of their sense of identity.

I don’t believe them. Of course I do believe that some people come out of school not knowing much mathematics but I don’t believe that it has anything to do with the way their brains are made. I like to make the point with an analogy.

It is true that if you go into a math class you’ll see a lot of kids who aren’t doing it at all well. So you say that these kids are not math minded. But now go into a French class. If you are in our country you’ll probably find that a lot of kids there who don’t speak French very well. So do we conclude that they are not Frenchly minded, that they don’t have a head for French? Of course not! Because you know that if these same people had grown up in France they would speak French perfectly well. You just can’t conclude that because someone didn’t learn something that they couldn’t learn it.

All of you who have enough intelligence to be reading this (or any) newspaper would have enough intelligence to be speaking French fluently if you grew up in France and I believe similarly that you would do math fluently and easily if you grew up in Mathland. Mathland is to math as France is to French. I am not denying that some people are more gifted for math than others. Einstein certainly had something special for mathematics just as Shakespeare had something special for language. But there is an ordinary level of competence in language that everyone can achieve and so too for math: everyone could with no effort at all achieve a level far higher than what our schools do not manage to give their students. One just has to grow up in Mathland.

But where is that place? It could be right here. In fact many families are little corners of Mathland because people speak math there. I don’t mean they go around saying stuff like 3742819 plus 5274932 is whatever it is. I’m thinking of families where people invent little games like figuring out whether it is believable that a hundred billion hamburgers have been sold by you know who. And I am thinking of people who take advantage of the fact that a computer is really a math speaking being. Some computers can almost understand very simple English and most these days will let you tell them what you want them to do by pointing to pictures on a screen. But all that is something that they have been taught to do by programmers who speak to the machine in its native language, which is a very mathematical kind of thing.

Kids can play a computer game without a single mathematical thought in their heads. But what if a kid makes a game? Too hard? Not at all. Tens of millions of kids have learned enough programming to create their own games. Many of them use the programming language Logo, which I launched back in the ’60s. But there are several other languages that are accessible to kids most notably one called Squeak designed by Alan Kay (who is the scientist who first described the idea of a laptop computer again back in the days when “computer” meant something at least as big as a refrigerator).

So this brings me back to my obsessions: Maine might become not only the Learning State but also the Math State. If indeed there is a difference between those two. And of course the first step there is the wave of iBooks now pouring into schools.

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.