Numbers count!

Another survey on the decline in the numeracy skills of 18-25 year olds in the UK with this BBC article.

It’s old hat now, but I still go back to the fact that the teaching of old fashioned ‘times-tables’ should never have been dropped from schools. Of course there is the common response today, that you don’t need them as we ‘all’ now have calculators!

To me, mental arithmetic (using tables based calculations) is fundamental to just about everything that you do today.