Hello everyone, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host Sean Carroll.

So as I'm recording this, I recently was reading an article by Clive Thompson on the

effect that the COVID pandemic has had on education. And the fact, of course, there was a whole

thing where students go to school for a while, couldn't go to school for a while, and people

had to learn remotely. But what about not university students, but lower levels, high school,

and secondary school students? Well, it turns out the effect of the pandemic was bad on

education here in the United States for sure. And that's maybe not surprising. You know,

a lot of the resources, a lot of the usual ways that we did things just weren't available,

even if we could have found ways that were just as good. It takes time to do that. And so

certain students are really hurt by that. But interestingly, the decline in scores,

which is sort of across the board, is much higher in math than it is in reading. So for whatever

reason, there was a much bigger deleterious effect of homeschooling on kids trying to learn

math than kids trying to learn reading. And why is that? And in the essay, tries to argue

that it's basically because when you're at home and you're trying to learn math, you're

going to learn it from your parents. And chances are good that your parents hate math because

a lot of people hate math. It's considered okay to hate math to say, oh, I'm not so good

at math. I don't really understand that stuff. It's too hard in a way that it's not considered

okay to hate reading or history or other forms of knowledge. And that's a weird thing.

And it's probably a bad thing. And one of the people in the world who's done the most

to combat this feeling is today's guest, John Allen Palos. Famously, he's the author

of Enumeracy, Mathematical Literacy and His Consequences. That's back in 1988. But he's

a mathematician at Temple University and he's kept up this fight to get people to overcome

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