If you’re not good at math and English, you won’t be good at life.
That was what British ministers said last week when they called math and English “the most important subjects in the world.” The education secretary made a more explicit link – you need good mathematics and English skills to get a good job. It’s what employers demand above all else, and they are “simply the most important vocational skills a young person can have.”
But there’s more to it. Math and English are the foundations that build a solid mind. They’re the foundations we build upon to strengthen the power of our imagination, so we can contemplate the grander things that only human beings can contemplate.
Our imagination is what makes us the beings we are, filled with yearning and light and vision and ideas. But, those ideas are only as strong as their foundation, just as a building can only reach as high as its foundation allows it.
A weak foundation offers a weak future. That is why Plato, the ancient world’s most foundational philosopher, wrote above his famous Academy: “Let no one enter here who has no knowledge of mathematics.”
Presumably, this was a strange thing to write above a building that was renowned for its philosophical meanderings, a building that conjures Raphael’s famous painting of men in white togas standing around asking questions about the meaning of things.
But, as Pythagoras showed, the connection between math and the secrets of existence are profound. However, in order to articulate those secrets – both to others and oneself – one needed to have mastery over language.
Thus, for the philosophers, mastery over math and language were the keys to mastery over self – those subjects were at the very core of what it meant to be human. That seems to be part of the motivation behind Monasa Learning Centre, a new Gulshan-based afterschool learning programme. They argue that strong foundations in math and English help overall performance in school, and, by extension, in life.
The centre operates on a personalised level, offering a tailor-made curriculum for each child that aims to strengthen the core of math and English. Using game-fication – a proven new educational technique – Monasa makes this process fun, and thus, as their slogan says, they “help your child be better.”
Schools today are facing a crisis – children have become too savvy. We as a society have grown beyond our current educational system, which is a product of the industrial revolution – an assembly line of rote learning that creates cookie-cutter kids, unable and unwilling to think for themselves.
All too often, the papers and exams we submit in school do not require students to display any original thinking. They are taught not to go against the grain or go out on a limb, but to memorise and repeat.
This is not the kind of society we want to be. We do not want to be cogs in some great industrial machine, in which we move through our daily lives without any greater purpose than simply doing what we are told to do.
We’re smarter than that. Let’s start acting like it. Perhaps we should all take a page out of Monasa’s book and try to Be Better.
