So there I was, queuing at the checkout in Waitrose. Ahead of me was one
woman, who had bought four bottles of Peroni marked down to 69p (wish
I'd spotted those) and one can of something fizzy cut to 29p. When she
presented these at the till, everything seemed to go into slow motion
(as so often happens, I find, when I'm next in the queue). The woman
behind the till froze in an attitude of bewilderment and mild panic when
confronted with these manually labelled items. Apparently they could
not be processed in the usual way - someone would have to add up the
price in their head. Clearly it was not going to be the woman at
the till - she wasn't even going to try. She left her post, returning
shortly with a young man who had a headset mike and a managerial air.
Confidently he totted up the items - four at 69p, one at 29p - £4.03,
sorted. At this point, the woman who was attempting to buy them pointed
out politely that he was wrong. He took a run at it and tried again,
coming up with a figure closer to the right total, but still out. The
purchaser at this point gave him the correct figure and he rang it up
without demur.
Can it really be that we live in a world where people below a certain
age - even those who work in jobs where it might be decidedly useful -
have no mental arithmetic? Has the 'education' system combined with our
ever growing dependence on technology to deprive much of the population
of what is surely still an important life skill? I hope not...
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The short answer, Nige, is yes, and it's not a recent thing. I interviewed many schooleavers from the late sixies onwards, from the late seventies there was a marked lack of even the most basic of knowledge, simple stuff such as..express 3/4 as a decimal figure, silence, "express?", "ok, convert", louder silence, what went wrong?
ReplyDeleteI'm tempted to answer Comprehensive Education - but I guess it's also the rise of calculator technology. What's worrying is that numbers and quantities must have no intrinsic meaning to those not in the habit of dealing with them mentally. Maybe this widespread innumeracy played a part in the great credit crunch...
ReplyDeleteYes we have is the answer and the only thing standing in the way of a total loss of mental arithmatic ability is the noble game of darts.
ReplyDeleteIt's maybe just to do with not doing maths in a while. A few years out of school and not doing any maths (and relying on machines) and you could become quite rusty.
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