I expect many readers will have blipped over the latest news of disaster in British classrooms. You may not have registered the importance of the revelation that our 15-year-olds are now among the worst at maths in the entire OECD, and have slipped to 17th place in reading skills.

Oh well, you may have said to yourself as you turned the page for more news of Maddy or the amnesiac canoeist; never mind. Someone else’s children. Someone else’s school. Some other set of parents who have failed to read to their kids, or who have allowed PlayStation to become a complete substitute for maths or any kind of academic effort.

Was that, roughly speaking, your reaction? If it was, and if there really are Britons out there who think they are immune from this classroom failure, then they need to think again. The educational problems of the minority can help to trigger an economic catastrophe for the whole of society. That is because mathematics - whether we like it or not - affects all of us, and our economy depends on all income groups having a basic understanding of numbers. (…)

Surely what we need to do is give people the confidence - and the intellectual tools - to make the right choices; and that means driving home the message, long before our children leave primary school, that maths really matters. It’s not just some abstract question of putting the right number in the box. It’s the difference between happiness and chaos. Without a basic feel for numbers, people will continue to make choices that are both individually disastrous and disastrous for society.

The American sub-prime crisis has shown how a few bad debts can put the world economic system at risk. The tragedy in Britain is that the most economically vulnerable are those who are failed by our educational system; and it is that educational failure that is now putting our economy in jeopardy - and that hits all of us.

Source: Telegraph.co.uk, United Kingdom
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2007/12/06/do0602.xml