Stop Teaching Math

A school superintendent in New Hampshire did something that would get him fired today. He walked into five classrooms and told the teachers to stop teaching math. No addition, no subtraction, no multiplication tables. For years. Then he tested those kids against the ones who'd been drilling arithmetic the whole time. The kids with zero math training destroyed them. Seven-year-olds with no formal math outperformed fifteen-year-olds with nine years of it. He published the results. Nobody cared. Then a Soviet satellite beeped for three weeks and we spent the next seventy years building the exact curriculum he warned us about.

This episode is about the math you were forced to learn, the math you actually use (spoiler: they're not the same), and whether the best way to get better at math is to stop teaching it altogether. Featuring a TED talk that made every math teacher sweat, a country smaller than Brooklyn that figured it out, and the fact that kids literally get better at mathematical reasoning during summer vacation than during the school year. The answer to our math problem has been sitting there for 97 years. We just kept calculating past it.

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Dumbify celebrates ideas so weird, wrong, or wildly impractical… they just might be brilliant. Hosted by David Carson, a serial entrepreneur behind multiple hundred-million-dollar companies and the go-to secret weapon for companies looking to unlock new markets through unconventional thinking. Dumbify dives into the messy, counter-intuitive side of creativity — the "dumb" ideas that built empires, broke rules, and ended up changing everything.