Malcolm Turnbull has called to make maths and science compulsory subjects for graduating high schoolers, in an effort to reverse the steep decline in Aussies dropping these oh-so-important STEM subjects.
Speaking in Western Sydney on Sunday, Turnbull said that we’d gone backwards in that area, and that in *his* day, you had to study maths or science to graduate.
“It’s one of the areas we’ve gone backwards, actually,” he said. “In my generation, you had to do maths or science to complete high school. Many parts of Australia now, you don’t have to do that.”
“We’ve got to get back to that and ensure that everyone is very literate in those STEM subjects. Science, maths, technology – that’s the future.”
As a nation, we’ve spent the last decade and a half dropping maths as soon as is humanly possible.
“Maths underpins just about everything – from the technology in your smartphone to the banking and financial systems that support our economy to how we measure and predict our health,” said Professor Nalini Joshi, Chair of the National Committee for Mathematical Sciences at Usyd, when announcing the uni’s new focus on maths.
“Maths is also the cornerstone of all scientific endeavour – so if we are training new scientists without a good understanding of maths, Australian science will soon be in trouble.”
Source: The Australian.
