Fractional Fall-Out

As I promised, here is the follow up on the Fractional Dispute article. In the article and the news article from USA Today, Professor Dennis DeTurck is presented to the reader as a person trying to make waves (likely to increase book sales) on why fractions, long division and more are outdated and the teaching of them should be relegated to much later. My article delved into how such concepts, if not satirical, would be damaging to the curriculum of many other fields as well. This article is devoted to the impact it would have on the real world.

Professor DeTurck was quoted as saying the majority of the criticism is “They'd always boil down to: 'What would we do in cooking and carpentry?' Naturally, the comments section was ablaze with posts primarily opposed and some for the stated positions of the professor. One such comment supported the removal of fractions by claiming the objections could be overcome by making the cooking and carpentry tools with decimal based lines as opposed to fraction based.

To put it bluntly, such a concept may ‘solve’ the problem but it is an idea not grounded in reality. Yes, you could change the plumbing, construction, carpentry and cooking tools into decimal base but that will not address a key detail. Who would buy them?

In order to shift to a decimal base or for that matter metric based system, you need the populace to expend large amounts of money in exchanging their current tools and kitchen supplies from a fraction based system to a decimal based system. These tools and kitchen devices are not cheap so good luck explaining to the country why they should make that expenditure when the paychecks are stretched tight already. Let us not ignore the untold thousands of recipes online, handed down family recipe books, or other recipe books either private or public and the construction design equivalents which would need to be converted as well. That would also require a large expenditure of time to correct. Oh, the unit conversion calculations are also based on a strong understanding of fractions as well.

However before you can get the populace to purchase these hypothetical decimal based systems, you first have to convince the businesses to produce them when there is an insufficient market demand to justify it. It is poor business sense to mass produce something people will not purchase. Further, the same business community has millions if not billions of dollars invested in English measurement based or fractional based machinery that they are not going to replace either due to the cost.

For most persons, the need for math ends with cooking, carpentry and tending their personal budget. So how is it possible to crack this triangle for a professor’s whim of delaying the teaching of fractions? You have to get the changes in education to be matched by the demands of the people and the demands of the business segment to match at the same time. However, those who are not in school are reluctant to change and with all of the prior charts I’ve seen those who are not in school far outnumber those in school.

We must always be on our guard to not let knowledge and ideas to guide our path without being tempered in wisdom and common sense. To do so otherwise invites us to be declared the fool who follows the folly of his mind.