John Bald: Why multiplication matters

John Bald is a former Ofsted inspector. He is Vice-President of the Conservative Education Society. “We don’t teach arithmetic. We teach mathematics,” said the retired headmaster. “Mathematics is problem solving.” Fine. There is more to life than page after page of sums. Still, as Stanislas Dehaene FRS showed in The Number Sense, mathematics grew historically, as it grows in young children, from counting, and multiplication and division are key steps in the process. Both depend on tables. As Dehaene says, these are an artificial concept, but so is the representation of words by letters, and indeed the rest of mathematics. An example is a negative number – obvious to mathematicians, but a huge adjustment to thinking for a young child.

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