The problem with having too many innumerate Brits

A levels, from the perspective of a ‘choice architect’, are a disaster. While pupils are free to pick and mix freely among the humanities, science is implicitly presented as an all-or-nothing package deal. Any aspiring scientist must study at least three of the big four: mathematics, physics, chemistry and biology. People who want to keep their options open, or who are reluctant to drop, say, history, are forced at around the age of 15 to make a highly asymmetric choice: either bet the farm on science or abandon it entirely. Faced with this skewed option, too many do the latter.

This means many otherwise intelligent people leave university with a rather poor understanding of science — not only of its strengths but its limitations. Having been fed only a diet of artificially neat geometry problems with a single right answer, someone whose mathematical education ended at 15 might easily conclude that anything expressed in numerical form is a hard fact — leaving no room for nuance or interpretation.