http://www.worthingherald.co.uk/worthing-letters/Battling-with-the-imperial-old.4997677.jp
Old hat?
Published Date: 19 February 2009
WHICH planet is Mr Garnett on?
Click here to read Mr Garnett's letter.
He states that the metric system is not yet the standard of measurement in
Worthing and that the majority of your readers can't immediately visualise what
20cm means.
This is a topic which I have studied a great deal but I shall restrict myself
here to two comments.
Firstly, we live in a world that is virtually 100 per cent metric.
Everything in the modern world, except the fabric of buildings over about 40
years old, has been designed and manufactured in metric units.
This includes all motor vehicles, all buildings and their interiors,
decoration, furniture, clothing, paving and all things electrical.
In fact, electrical measurements have always been metric.
So if Mr Garnett wants to avoid metrication, he must take off all his clothes,
find a very old property to live in, stay away from all vehicles, not venture
from his home and eat and drink virtually nothing.
He must also switch off everything electrical (including his central heating
pump).
I wish him well.
Secondly, when he and I were at school (I am 61 and I am guessing he is of a
similar age) we were taught imperial units and we saw them being used.
We learnt about hundredweights and the coalman delivered coal in hundredweight
bags.
We learnt about stones, pounds and ounces, and bags of flour were sold in
stones and virtually everything else that was weighed was sold in pounds and
ounces.
What we learned in school was relevant to what we saw in the outside world.
Today, our children are utterly confused because certain elements of our
society refuse to give up their imperial units.
Children learn about metres in school, but see estate agents still using feet
and inches and square feet for office space.
Children learn about kilograms and grams, but see most adults giving their body
weights in stones and pound – units which are now all but extinct.
And then, of course, there's the road signs.
If people think we have been the laughing stock of Europe because of our
reaction to the recent snow, they should see what the rest of Europe thinks
about us and our imperial road signs.
Although we live in a virtually 100 per cent metric world, the units that
children see written down or spoken are often given in imperial measurements.
Our reaction to this, of course, is to blame our children for not taking an
interest in mathematics, when the blame rests firmly on the shoulders of people
like Mr Garnett for hanging on to a system which is now redundant and confusing
to our young people.
I taught mathematics for 31 years between 1969 and 2000 (most of that time in
Worthing, incidentally) and never once taught imperial units.
Every year over 600,000 UK young people leave school and go out into the "real"
world – that's over 24 million since I began teaching, many of them having
little idea about the use of measurement in the modern world.
And this applies not just to people at the lower end of the mathematical
ability range; I know a couple of accountants who tell me they were totally
confused by measurement when they left school for the reasons I have just
stated.
I have no doubt that Mr Garnett can give me a hundred "reasons" why we should
stick to imperial measurements.
I have heard them all many times before – every one of them a red herring.
These red herrings, even when totalled up, do not begin to outweigh the
overriding needs of our young people who are, when all is said and done, the
future of our country.
Alan Young
Moat Way
Worthing
