Some Will Fail

John Gruber points to P. Z. Myers’s piece, “Richard Cohen, advocate for ignorance,” in response to this work of Richard Cohen’s. Mr. Cohen is disturbed that a young girl in Los Angeles dropped out of high school because she was unable to pass algebra — algebra is now required in order to graduate — and so attempts to argue that there is no need for algebra. But he provides no argument, only foolish assertions grouped in ungainly masses. One supposes that if Mr. Cohen were as trained in Rhetoric as he was in Typing, he would have learned how to construct a persuasive argument.

This is a shame, but perhaps he knew of no other way to avoid asking the value of a high school diploma.

Mr. Cohen titles his piece, “What is the value of Algebra?” Monday, while skimming through Sir Thomas L. Heath’s translation of Euclid’s Στοιχεῖα, I found this amusing anecdote.

Another story is told of Euclid which one would like to believe true. According to Stobaeus, “some one who had begun to read geometry with Euclid, when he had learnt the first theorem, asked Euclid, ‘But what shall I get by learning these things?’ Euclid called his slave and said, ‘Give him threepence, since he must make gain by what he learns.'” [Heath, 3]