Monk's moments: What to do when the numbers don’t add up

It has recently been suggested that schoolchildren should be able to drop maths at 14, because, it is argued, what is taught thereafter won’t be much use to them. The criterion of utility seems a strange one. I was helping my son revise for his GCSEs and I am not entirely sure of the ‘usefulness’ of Mussolini’s foreign policy, or Ovid’s poetry, or the electrolytic purification of copper, but I feel happy that they are bound to come in handy one day (especially in his intended career as a comedian).