Solving for x again

I hated algebra, and so read with interest a long commentary in the Sunday New York Times titled, "Is Algebra Necessary?" by a retired professor named Andrew Hacker.

I happen to think algebra, though hated, IS necessary, and I read the piece looking for a specific word that would support my contention. And then I found it.

"But it’s not easy to see why potential poets and philosophers face a lofty mathematics bar," Hacker wrote.

Now join me on the living room couch on a day in 1987, next to me and my daughter Jessica, who was in eighth grade. She hated algebra also. I was trying to help her with it. After a few minutes, she said, "I. Can't. Do. This." Neither could I it turned out. Oh, I remembered the basic steps in solving for x, but I had learned it a certain way, in 1956, and it was being taught a different way now.

The rest of the day, I wondered why my daughter should be grinding her teeth down to nubs over a subject that, most people agreed, she would never use. I tried to think if I had ever used it, and in the midst of that thinking decided it would make a good column. I was writing three columns a week for The San Diego Union at the time, and thought this was a subject with which many readers would identify.

And so, in those hours that afternoon, I discovered the necessity for algebra. Algebra is the kindergarten of philosophy, I don't care what Andrew Hacker thinks. After several grades of manipulating hard numbers, eighth-graders become advanced enough in their thinking to be ready to think in the abstract. They have to solve for x.

Which was precisely what I was doing. I wrote a column that day which said that writing a column was nothing more than solving for x, and that knowing how to do that began with algebra, which was the kindergarten of philosophy. Sitting at my computer, algebra was practically a bird sitting on my shoulder. Still is, chirping away as I key these words. In fact life itself has turned out to be one big old x, requiring constant solving, sometimes requiring professional help.

I am not alone in stating this argument. In the very first Comment following Dr. Hacker's piece, Commenter Mike wrote: "Algebra is a foundation stone for our ability to think critically as are philosophy and logic." So, see?