ONE OF THE JUMP TUTORS, HILARY, A SUCCESSFUL ACTOR, WAS extremely nervous before her first lesson. She had dropped math in Grade 10 and was having second thoughts about teaching a subject that had always terrified her. When her student arrived, he was accompanied by his mother, who handed Hilary a stack of psychological assessments. The child apparently had an attention-deficit disorder as well as another disorder that prevented him from taking notes or writing. During his lesson, he occasionally appeared to fall asleep, his eyes rolling back in their sockets.
Hilary emerged at the end of the lesson looking rather shaken. I told her I would find her an easier student. But she said she was actually more afraid of the math. After six months, she covered all of the existing JUMP material with the boy, and I had to design new units specifically for her. When I called her with several weeks of work, it took her only 10 minutes to learn it over the phone.
One way to lose one’s fear of mathematics is to teach it. Several JUMP tutors who dropped math in high school are now among our best instructors. Tutors who were once afraid of mathematics can empathize with their students. They are careful not to make a child feel stupid, or to skip steps in explaining concepts. As well, they often bring special skills from their own line of work: actors like Hilary, for instance, are good at conveying their sense of excitement to their students.
One of the goals of JUMP is to give people who are not mathematicians or educators the opportunity to relearn mathematics (or learn mathematics properly for the first time) by explaining it to children. Because our tutors aren’t required to have a background in math, we have found it easy to recruit dedicated volunteers from all walks of life. Among the 200 volunteers currently working for JUMP, 5% at most are mathematicians, scientists, or teachers. The rest are high-school students, university students, actors, writers, artists, business people, tradespeople, and retired professionals. This year, our oldest students will volunteer as JUMP tutors in their old elementary schools. We plan to train our students to be tutors when they reach Grade 10.
Since it was established in my apartment four years ago, JUMP has tripled in size each year, growing from 8 tutors and 15 students to 200 volunteers and 1,500 students. In growing so quickly, we have relied on experienced tutors and staff to train and oversee new tutors. We have been able to maintain the quality of the program, in spite of its rapid growth, because the tutors all work from the same manual (in which the steps are laid out in a way anyone could follow), and because their students are all expected to pass the same tests (with a mark of 80% or higher). Three years from now, under our present business plan, we hope to provide tutors for 7,000 children in 40 schools.
Some educators who are otherwise supportive of JUMP are concerned that a charity that relies on the work of volunteers is beginning to fulfill a function that should be the responsibility of the public school system. I share this concern, but I believe organizations like JUMP will be obliged play a role in public education for some time. Though I look forward to a day when JUMP becomes obsolete, I am certain our society will never invest in tutors for children, or in proper support and training for teachers, until the benefits of having a genuinely educated population are demonstrated on a large scale. A poorly educated population, unfortunately, will never see the point in electing a government committed to producing a well-educated population.
Whenever we have needed some service or resource at JUMP, whether it was the advice of a lawyer or accountant, a donation of books, or extra tutoring for a needy child, someone has phoned offering to help. There seems to be a growing reservoir of goodwill in our society, waiting for an outlet. And yet, as environmental, economic, and social crises erupt on a scale that was previously unimaginable, we find ourselves incapable of taking rational, collective action to avert these crises. There may never have been a greater gap between our global ideals and the way we conduct our daily lives.
A simple example illustrates this point. Every year in our cities there are ever-more-frequent smog warnings, and more reports of respiratory problems brought on by air pollution. But how many parents of children suffering from such problems would make fuel efficiency or low emissions a priority in buying a car? How many would think twice about driving their children across the city to purchase something they needed? The majority of the people who graduate from our schools are not even able to spot a contradiction in a commercial that promises a sense of freedom and self-determination to anyone daring enough to buy the most environmentally damaging vehicle available and drive it through a pristine wilderness.
The problem illustrated by this example is, I believe, even deeper than the political debates that consume so much of our attention. These debates have never called into question the assumption that children are born with vastly different mental abilities, or that the majority can never be expected to learn to think and reason clearly about mathematics or the natural world. This view of children, accepted by conservatives and socialists alike, may well be the chief cause of humanity’s most persistent problems, including poverty, inequity, and the destruction of the environment.
Whether one places one’s hopes for resolving our problems in governments or the private sector, it seems obvious that no economic system can be expected to distribute the products of our labour fairly or efficiently if only a fraction of the members of our society have the ability to weigh the costs and benefits of producing or buying various goods, or the ability to extrapolate or foresee how the effects of their purchases will add up. Before we can determine the best kind of economy to satisfy our material needs, we may have to raise a generation whose needs are less selfish and irrational than ours.
Recently in Ontario, the president of a major parents’ organization told a reporter he approved of the newly introduced curriculum in mathematics because, in his words, “It will afford my son more opportunities to compete in the world.” Sadly, the opportunity to “compete in the world” is the only reward a typical parent can promise children who wonder why they should study a subject they hate. For most parents, the necessity of vying for a job was the only reason they could see for studying math themselves. But while a facility with numbers will certainly help a person find employment, this is hardly the only thing that can be gained from an education in mathematics.
If schools were allowed to build walls around our national parks, and the majority of children were prevented from entering on the grounds that they lacked the ability to appreciate or understand what was inside, we might say something had been stolen from those children. And if the majority of children were convinced by their teachers that there was nothing beautiful or moving in the sight of a snow-capped mountain or a sky full of stars, we might be concerned that they had been stunted in their emotional or spiritual growth. But an equally beautiful part of nature has been made inaccessible to almost every child, and no one has noticed the loss.
Mathematicians often describe mathematics as a spiritual activity. This, of course, is surprising to most people. But mathematics, after all, is simply a different way of perceiving nature. It is a way of seeing symmetries and hidden connections that transcend the human imagination, a way of entering worlds so elegant and surprising they inspire a sense of awe. At JUMP we hope to encourage children to appreciate nature with all their faculties, allowing them to develop a deeper respect for the interconnectedness of all living and non-living things. At an early age they will be introduced, through games and enriched units, to the mathematics that underlies contemporary science — topology, group theory, graph theory, and chaos theory — as well as to new mathematics stemming from chemistry, biology, and computer science. Logic, argument analysis, and even the mathematics of the environment (how our actions add up) will be taught. Eventually we hope to develop lessons in philosophy and the arts.
There is no scarcity in the world of ideas; when someone understands an idea, its beauty is not consumed or used up. But everything in our present system of education seems designed to make real knowledge scarce, to keep the deepest ideas out of the hands of all but a few. If they are lucky, students graduating from high school will likely believe that they have one or two talents and that the majority of subjects offered at school are either uninteresting or beyond their grasp. In this sense our schools are quite efficient: 12 years is a relatively short time in which to close so many doors forever.
Though the developed countries of the world presently have the resources to feed and educate everyone on earth, more than half the world’s children still live in abject poverty. In affluent countries, violence, overconsumption, and the destruction of the environment continue at the same pace. JUMP was founded in reaction to the institutionalized apathy and ignorance that underlie these problems. Children who grow up frustrated and insecure, meeting only a fraction of their potential, unable to reason clearly or weigh the consequences of their actions, and having witnessed few models of effective charity, will be exploited and misled with ease by corporations and politicians seeking gain. Until educated people devote themselves to breaking this cycle of ignorance, no amount of political action is likely to improve our condition.
The profound love parents feel for their children, the money and time they lavish on their families, have, to this day, been insufficient to change the world. Until we reach beyond our families to children in need, we will continue to neglect the needs of the children closest to us by passing on to them a world that is unfit to inherit.