While over the past year I’ve looked at metric adoption from a number of angles, the thing I keep coming back to again and again is how we’re shortchanging our children. Granted, my own daughter is almost 25 years old now so my own progeny concerns me less than our children as a whole and the generations that will follow them.
Metric units are used internationally for science
We are doing them a huge disservice every year that we continue to use U.S. customary units (for those new to this blog, we imported imperial units and then futzed with them so they no longer align with any other country in the world) in our education system. Metric units were designed to work together in very logical ways rather than the hodgepodge of units that make up our current measures.
Right now we teach our children both U.S. customary and metric units and under the new Common Core Standards (talked about this in a previous blog) measurement standards are dropped from the curriculum once students hit sixth grade. Still, every minute our customary units are taught in school is a minute wasted and that time would be better spent on other subjects. And every minute that metric units get second billing to U.S. customary units means that we’re ill preparing our children for careers in science, medicine and any activity that will take them out of the country or deal with others internationally.
Increasingly our children will study abroad—but they won’t know the measures used almost everywhere else in the world.
In fact, our children are less likely to stay within our borders during their education than at any point in our history and, according to the U.S. Department of Education,
Of course, the minute most of our students hit the ground in another country they face an additional hurdle beyond language and culture: lack of familiarity with the metric system that almost everyone else uses. Luckily, the metric system is easy to learn but why make our children have to learn one more thing on the fly when they shouldn’t have to.
In fact, within the first month on this project I was flying to Washington, D.C. to visit friends and begin my research when I happened to sit next to a middle-school math teacher (one of many coincidences I’ve encountered on this project but that’s another blog).
She basically said that her students didn’t think it was a good use of their time to learn the metric system because they’d never use it again. She also said her counterargument was that it was like learning a second language and it might come in handy since other people use it.
Even as early as I was in this project, I offered her the following counterargument to use instead…
Sure, you don’t need to learn the metric system if you:
- Never plan to leave the country;
- Don’t plan on a well-paying job in science or technology;
- Don’t plan on a well-paying job in medicine;
- Don’t plan on doing anything associated with international trade (including manufacturing and distribution).
Students arriving here will have difficulty learning our illogical measurement system
Not only does our metric adoption hang up our students leaving the country, it also hangs up students coming to our country to study here and they mean big economic business:
International students must start scratching their heads almost the minute they arrive here because they’ve never encountered a system as messed up as ours. “Wait,” I imagine them saying to themselves, “I thought this country was advanced.”
While I’m not suggesting that students wouldn’t come here to study because we don’t use the metric system, it just makes it more difficult for them than it needs to be. International tourism is also one of the reasons Hawaii has considered adoption of the metric system to make it easier for travelers to get around once they arrive. To me, that just adds one more reason to change over to the metric system.
Those with our children’s interests at the forefront will assist with metric adoption
As this movement progresses, it will very important to let parents, grandparents, guardians, etc. know the disservice we’re doing to our current and future generations by clinging to our outmoded ways. Riled parents would probably be one of the most effective ways to give this movement some momentum—but they need to understand the issue first—something I’m hoping to help with.
Let’s give our kids a break and provide them with the best system available and help prepare them for today’s world—it’s the least they deserve from us even if the switchover will take a bit of effort on our part.
Linda
More Than A Mile Behind: America and the Metric System 