Evidence that primary school students will have a hard time catching up on math in time for high school if they are off to a weak start is worrying, because they are growing up into a society in which myriad mathematical claims are constantly on offer, in studies, polls, financial statements, scientific theories, economic policies and investment strategies.
The Education Quality and Accountability Office is an Ontario government agency that tracks the progress of school children in the province. Its latest report finds that young students are apt to diverge over time in their mathematical competence - an ominous harbinger of widening inequality.
One need not have a strong preference for quantitative ways of looking at the world to accept that a reasonable degree of numeracy - itself a word coined only a few decades ago, as a necessary counterpart to literacy - is needed in order to evaluate all sorts of allegations and conclusions. Yet many otherwise well educated people are frightened by the very sight of an equation, or at the mere thought of Cartesian co-ordinates.
The upshot is either a kind of superstition in which the conclusions of scientific studies are accepted on faith or a despairing disbelief when scientists - perhaps especially economists and other social scientists - disagree.
Modern citizens should be able to approach quantitative studies and claims both critically and respectfully. Indeed, non-scientific lay people may be better able to evaluate them than they expect, because statistical studies often depend upon some quite loose, non-mathematical concepts, and common sense may detect imprecision and even fallacies in the very premises of the research in question.
Democracy and the market economy, in this age of mathematical science, require a public that is numerate enough to have some sense of what is valid - and won't just acquiesce or shrug their shoulders.