Only 32% of American students are proficient in math.

This is a bit of a sidetrack from what I usually talk about, but I promise to tie it back in to my usual discussion of politics as quickly as possible.

A facebook friend, who is a math teacher at a community college, posted this article earlier this evening.

Can US compete if only 32 percent of students are proficient in math?

The US ranked 32nd out of 65 countries (or cities such as Shanghai and Hong Kong) that participated in the latest international PISA, an exam administered to representative samples of 15-year-old students by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

My first reaction, and the one that initially makes the link the politics for this blog, was “Well maybe that explains why so many people are incapable of understanding why spending more money won’t get rid of the national deficit.”

Suddenly it all makes sense doesn’t it? Because surely the only explanation for a country full of people who think that taking out more loans will get them out of debt is that somewhere along the line, the education system failed to teach them basic math skills.

We are a country of people who can’t understand math.

I mean, at 32% proficient, I get to count myself among some of the higher than average people in math skills…and if you knew me in high school…that’s pretty sad. I failed 9th grade algebra…nearly failed geometry.

Math was not my best subject to say the least.

But could this be why no one in this country understand economics? People would rather have a politician tell them what to do (and politicians who want to give them things, i.e. liberals, will always be more popular) because *”math is boring and really really hard!”best whiny voice*

I think that could be the case.

Of course I could be wrong, I wouldn’t be surprised if I was. I’m mostly kidding around.

Regardless of whether these scores of indicative of why people can’t understand the economy or not…it’s still extremely sad that in a country where there is so much opportunity, where people are handed a free education for 12 years of their life, that people could fail so badly to take advantage of that education.

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