Shalinee Sharma, CEO of Zearn, a math learning platform writes in Fast Company
When I shared some statistics with a business executive about the poor job we are doing teaching math to kids, he responded, “This is why people are getting cheated out of their money.” He was referring to people being scammed by investment fraud and other schemers, and he was right. With broad-based numeracy, we can build a society of people who are capable of protecting one another. Financial literacy lessons are shown to help as well, when they are additive to widespread numeracy, not a substitute for it. For example, lessons on how insurance or a mortgage works requires a strong working knowledge of rates and percentages—ideas that should be mastered in seventh and eighth grade.
A range of problems that might seem disconnected are the result of undereducating our kids, specifically in the world of mathematics. Conversely, a lot of problems will be solved when we build a numerate generation. The greater the numeracy, the more likely that we’ll produce a population capable of solving environmental, technological, health, and other societal problems. Unlocking everyone’s potential wouldn’t just increase the proportion of engineers coming up with answers to our most pressing problems—it would break down the wall between STEM and other fields of expertise, and produce a society where everyone has the ability and power to engage with the technological and quantitative questions around them, so that different domains of knowledge can work together.
Here she is discussing her book Math Mind
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