Probably the development which has had the most damaging effect on the morale of school maths, is the early decision of the computerists that <<Maths has nothing to do with computers!>>. It was a much-circulated mantra which was aired when new PCs were being sold.  We know why the computer industry threw their support behind it —because if a person, who was thinking of buying a PC, thought they would have to use maths to get the full benefit of the machine… they would expect to stumble and fail. Why?  Because in the 1960s a dark cloud of Mathsphobia was already hanging over maths. The only way of teaching maths to the mass of average students had been for some time… to present it as, much resented, ju-ju. The typical student didn’t know whythey were doing it, what it meant, or whyever it was treated as rather important. But in those long-gone days stoicism was the norm, and a respectable few managed to train themselves to do it.

It is also possible that a whiff of the demoralisation of the subject had spread into the public mind.  Some of this pessimism-about-maths was probably down to a rumour… that the maths establishment had hopelessly failed to explain Russell’s Contradiction, and had subsequently disgracefully enforced Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory, which amounted to <<Stop asking awkward questions!>>,   

Actually it is extremely obvious that maths has everything to do with computers, because the computer automates maths, and does all the hard organising and manipulation for you.

Or, to change the metaphor, it is a truism that computers can be used to do things you previously needed to turn to maths to do.

Unfortunately a lot of elite v. elite hostility began to appear when computers were first introduced, because the maths community felt that their subject was being traduced —not to mention made redundant… This mantra that computers have “nothing to do with maths” was like a red rag to a bull.

It didn’t help that the computerists treated the success of their machines as mainly down to state-of-the-art electronics. They weren’t going to concede an inch to the idea that it was “maths” which was actually doing the crucial magic…by means of automation.

In effect the computerists used any helpful maths they could lay their hands on —to simplify the software— but they didn’t give it any credit in the end-result.  The very conception of maths as an abstract thought-tool was being banished into the air.

Later they applied the same kind of gross linguistic put-down in relation to epistemology, which they started calling “knowledge engineering”. In effect they were crudifying both maths and philosophy.  It should have provoked a stiff rebuttal from the Leaders of Academia, but they were often the very people who preferred to join the bandwagon… rather than defend the venerable values underlying their scholarly cultures. The very essence of academia was being abused, dismissed and over-ridden.

So what have we lost? What needs to be done to restore the integrity and relevance of maths and epistemology?

For 2,500 years pure maths and epistemology were regarded as superior disciplines, as deeply thoughtful sensibilities… as quests for a very superior kind of truth, not dangling mere commercial-grabbing, get-rich-quick opportunities.

Well, this could only happen because the underlying morale of disinterested rational inquiry had fallen to an all-time low. This was down to the failure of the elites to understand the two mega-baffling problems: those surrounding the relativity of light and the self-membership of sets. On paper both these problems had been “solved”… by spacetime and Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory.

But both these “so called solutions” were miles away from proper explanations.

Spacetime was about the most dirigiste concept imaginable —a veritable paradigm of absolutism— and hardly a good instrument to explain genuine, baffling, unsettling, active relativity. Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory simply tried to define Russell’s Contradiction out of existence.

This was demoralising to the nth degree. To expect the honour of the subject to survive this let-down, was, of course, naïve by any yardstick. It has left the door open for a crudification of maths and epistemology which ought to have been shamefully embarrassing. Instead, this failure of the elites to live up to their presumptions, has finally produced an everyday sense of crudification: materialistic pragmatism as the only yardstick which counts… a sure-fire way for the Western World to talk itself into oblivion.