Perhaps with the much touted Patriot Act’s impact on education, the emphasis on math and the sciences in curriculum has created a need for a new sort of word problem.

Allow me to elaborate:

If a battalion is two or more companies plus headquarters, and a company is two to three platoons plus headquarters, and a platoon is two or more squads, and a squad is 10 privates, a staff sergeant and a corporal: how many battalions would have been needed in the recent Iraq war’s ‘surge?’

Or:

We have a war. We start with 100,000 troops. People die. We have a surge that adds more troops. If the surge adds 30,000 troops and the president’s Sept. 13, 2007 address of the nation describes plans to remove 30,000 troops by July 2008, how many troops are left? For extra credit: how does the number of troops in Iraq in July 2008 compare to the number of troops in Iraq in January 2007?

Searching frantically for your TI-83? Poker chips? Abacus? Not to worry, a simple application of logic will suffice. Think back to your early algebra. If you add x to y, and then subtract x again, you’re back to y!

Apparently ‘No Child Left Behind’ was a little too late for some of our nation’s leaders.

The recent news about troop increases and decreases, and successes and failures in Iraq is more than enough to leave the most mathematically-inclined members of the population reeling with visions of regressions dancing in their heads; but what of the masses? In a time when supercomputers are capable of calculating pi out to thousands of digits, why is it that people can’t even be trusted with simple operations like addition and subtraction?

Why are numbers, oft cited as inflexible and accurate, being used to obfuscate basic information about something as critical to public policy as a war? To most Americans, at least one of those thousands is more than just a number that can be added or subtracted from someone’s new military calculations.

The disrespect shown by the Bush administration in thinking that number games can fool the American public is blatant, but the question remains: will it work?

We can only hope that the emphasis that we’re now placing on math and science isn’t merely in an attempt to restore the status quo of education’s bygone days, that it is sufficient to show the recent attempt to show off a strategy in Iraq as an elementary school manipulation of the numbers. And as for English and reading comprehension? Those will have to wait for a time when our government spending isn’t busy elsewhere.