How many readers of this can state the law of sines? How about solve exponential equations and inequalities? Presumably everyone who is a University student can, since these are requirements of the curriculum of Georgia’s public high schools (and hopefully all other states), and therefore, I should think, necessary for getting a diploma within the state.

Yet I know that many University students cannot do these things. I know because I have tutored students in math the entire time I have been a student here, and these high school requirements are still taught in our algebra and precalculus courses. Many students still struggle with them.

But I do not blame the students for this at all. I blame our ineffective schools. The way math is taught in our schools is terrible. What curriculum there is will not even be taught successfully.

Part of the problem is the No Child Left Behind Act, which has turned schools into standardized test factories.

But mathematics in American schools has long been off course. As my math professor this summer has opined several times, American schools do not teach students about the reasoning side of mathematics, only calculation. “The worst thing that ever happened to math in America,” he says, “was that they stopped teaching Euclid.”

He’s speaking of Euclid’s book Elements, a 2500-year old exploration of numbers and geometry. Math is not just about computation – it is about reasoning, and since removing the study of material like Euclid, the reasoning side is gone.

The New York Times recently had an interview with a math professor who immigrated from India. He tells how he was “shocked” when he moved here to see how much Americans hated math. “People actually took pleasure in explaining how bad they were at it,” he noted.

This is a consequence of math being taught without a purpose. Teaching its structure without the purpose for which the structure exists is like teaching English grammar without reading any literature: you’re only getting half of the picture, and the boring, technical part at that. People would hate reading if they thought it was only about sentence structure. But reading and writing are about expression, about learning, about thinking in new ways.

Because of the horrible state of our math education, we have a population much less acquainted with real logic. If you’ve never taken an upper-level math course, you may be surprised at how difficult reasoning can be. No doubt our political debate would improve if ordinary people could automatically cut through the layers of hot air our politicians give us to make themselves sound good.

Math is a deep, interesting and vital subject. Our schools do not teach it as such, and we all continue to suffer for it.

- Matt Brandenburgh is the opinions editor for the Red & Black.