I was completely bogged down with work so I missed some friends’ Simpsons Math Party in honor of last night’s episode, in which Principal Skinner is removed from his position after a Larry Summers-like incident in which he said girls are bad at math. His replacement divides the school along gender lines — the girls’ half is beautifully landscaped with famous women artists’ works on the walls, and so on. Unfortunately for Lisa, math class is now about how numbers “make you feel.” “Is the number 7 odd, or just different?” asks the teacher, before leading the class in a self-affirmation conga line.

Lisa decides to sneak over to the boys side, which, in typical Simpsons fashion, has been turned into a post-apocalyptic warzone. The boys are savages, running around playing “guns” and drawing robots made of guns blowing up things with guns that shoot guns. The one saving grace for Lisa is that they study real math there. With Marge’s help she dresses as a boy and goes to math class where she (gasp!) actually learns that +5 and -5 are solutions to X² = 25. When Lisa gets into a playground fight Bart discovers her secret and helps her become more like a boy. Lisa gains acceptance by beating up Ralph and “becoming all that she hates.”

In the end, Lisa wins the prize for best math student and unmasks herself, saying that it proves girls are good at math. Bart responds with the point that it is because she “became a boy” that she could learn the math. As Lisa tries to wend her way through these opposing points the auditorium descends into chaos. As the credits roll we’re treated to Jethro Tull’s masterpiece, Thick As A Brick.

For me, the credits were probably the best part of this episode. While I have to give credit to the show for taking a difficult issue and trying their best to satirize it, it misses the point, I think. To the writers, the public discussion of the Summers case focused too much on him and not on what the underlying problem issue, which is that of mathematics education. Correspondingly, Skinner is disposed of in a matter of minutes (his pandering nature could be another subject of discussion). The new principal, a hard-talking cariacature of a feminist, decries inequity but is uninterested in real reform. The episode kind of moves from there on out in the logic of The Simpsons world. In a way, it all justifies Skinner/Summers, since the most vocal critics are uninterested in the real issue at hand (math).

The issue of gender and learning and whether there are “gendered” school subjects is just brought up at the end of the episode and never addressed! Perhaps to the writers it lampoons itself by its absurdity and we’re supposed to laugh Bart out of the debate, but Lisa takes him seriously and so do a huge number of people. Indeed, the gender-labeling of academic disciplines is probably one of the more harmful effects of our current public education system. When Bart claims that you have to be boy-like to learn math, is this a pointer to the debate we should be having, or just a garnish for the episode? I would argue that the chaos of the “chair-fight” at the end points gives the latter effect — the last thing the show wants is to seriously moralize. But to leave it so ambiguous is a bit dangerous, I think.

What the episode does do is bring up a whole barrel of ideas to play around with and fodder for discussion, so it wasn’t a total wash. Plus, how often do you hear Thick As A Brick on TV?

One of the things that unsettles me the most is when people revel in their own ignorance. They go around proudly proclaiming that they never bothered to learn A and they turned out ok and happy, so clearly A is not important to know. It’s a roundabout way of arguing that it’s ok to be bad at A because secretly A isn’t worth it. Of course, since most of the public discussion about this happens in the media, it’s invariably mathematics and science that bear the brunt of it. The latest “contribution” to the fire is Richard Cohen’s article on algebra.

Cohen isn’t good at math. He can handle “basic arithmetic all right (although not percentages),” but barely made it through algebra and geometry and then turned his back on mathematics forever. He boldly asserts that math should be on a need-to-know basis because “most of math can now be done by a computer or a calculator.” The modern computer age has made many mechanical jobs obsolete, and with them, many skills, it seems. Being able to do percentages seems pretty important to me, given our tax system, but I suppose we have computers to do our taxes for us as well — why bother knowing how to check if its correct?

It’s not really the uselessness of math that Cohen is interested it — he wants to establish a pecking order among disciplines, at the top of which is writing. Because to him, computers are math, and computers cannot “write a column or even a thank-you note — or reason even a little bit” (leave that aside for a moment, you AI-fiends), math is inferior to writing. Someone should send him back to a rhetoric class and make him reread his Aristotle.

Cohen’s final surge off the tracks of reason is a lovely piece of anecdotal evidence:

all the people in my high school who were whizzes at math but did not know a thing about history and could not write a readable English sentence. I can cite Shelly, whose last name will not be mentioned, who aced algebra but when called to the board in geography class, located the Sahara Desert right where the Gobi usually is. She was off by a whole continent.

Perhaps a remedial logic class is in order as well, although I suppose philosophy is equally wasted on Cohen. The lovely canard of the hapless math geek who can’t manage to understand any other subject is cheap and tawdry. Is this the best that he can do to muster an argument?

Cohen privileges his fear of mathematics, implicitly claiming that this fear is unique to the subject

There are those of us who know the sweat, the panic, the trembling, cold fear that comes from the teacher casting an eye in your direction and calling you to the blackboard. It is like being summoned to your own execution.

Oh poor poor Richard Cohen. I shed a tear for you. Mathematics emasculated you and now you will have your revenge. You’ll get those nerds back. Gobi Desert! Ha ha ha!

It’s true that some people are not good at math. This doesn’t mean that they couldn’t be good at math, but for whatever reason either through their own lack of interest or a poor background from grade school on up, it doesn’t click for them. And maybe there should be a debate as to whether algebra should be required for graduation. This column is not debate — it’s a shoddily assembled collection of logical fallacies and cheap shots. It’s true that a computer would never be able to write this column. But who would want it to?

A middle-school student I know told me recently that the two subjects that you really don’t need to know are science and history. I asked her why and she said “because you don’t need them for your life.” I tried to argue with her that yes, you don’t need them to live, but imagine how much richer a life you will live because you know them. History and science give you the why of things; they let you understand how the world works, how to tell when someone is feeding you a line about politics or the big bang. If a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, then no knowledge is safety! Big Brother would be proud of you, Richard Cohen. Have you read any Orwell?

Update : via Kevin Drum.