“A musician wakes from a terrible nightmare.” So begins the remarkable commentary entitled “A Mathematician’s Lament”. The piece opens with said musician’s dreamworld, in which music has become a mandatory school course. Educators are seen force-feeding unfortunate children with hollow lessons packed with musical notation and theory, where the direction of stems is vital for passing marks and the circle of fifths is memorized by third grade. However, all this is visibly bereft of one vital element: the actual creation of music.

In a cold sweat, a painter across town is described waking from a similar dream in which painting classes are reduced to a course entitled “Paint-by-Numbers” and art teachers express aversion to such advanced ideas as blank canvasses.

The piece’s author, mathematician Paul Lockhart, steps in here.

“Sadly, our present system of mathematics education is precisely this kind of nightmare.”

What exactly does this mean? Lockhart spends the next 25 pages lamenting—hence the piece’s nickname, “Lockhart’s Lament”—the loss of mathematics as a free and abstract art, an act of creativity that is not meant to confine scores of students bored out of their minds, but to liberate them.

According to Lockhart, numbers are not meant to be penned in specific formulas. That takes, as he puts it, the “fun” out of it all. Numbers are meant to be explored, investigated, played with.

The reason math class is “boring”, he reasons, is because we’re simply going at it all wrong. He fears that we are losing the true meaning, the pleasure, of math with every generation that passes. So, he reasons, why not bring the “real” math back, instead of boring students to tears with textbooks and so-called “real-world problems”?

Why not spend math classes solving problems without the typical formulaic crutches for the sheer joy of it?

I reacted, upon reading the Lament, as any typical student would have: “Nice idea, but that’s absurd.”

Coming from a society that values individualism, creativity, and imagination, Lockhart’s opening repertoire of scenarios resonated immensely. Studying musical theory but never listening to it; absurd! Never being allowed to paint outside the lines; equally so.

And having dabbled a bit in each of the above arts, I could easily see how mathematics, when freed of its dry, formulaic restraints and reduced to simple patterns, could be rendered as beautiful an art as any other.

Yet I doubt that were the entire math curriculum miraculously transformed into a forum of free expression and exploration, students would be any more excited to actually learn it than they are now.

You see, in a perfect world, Lockhart’s theory would indeed reign supreme. In the perfect world, students might actually enter classes, saying “I sure would like to explore if the areas of triangles are related to circles today!” They would plop down in their seats, take out a pencil, and puzzle exhaustively for the full period, and, much to their teacher’s delight, even debate with their neighbors about the theories they have recently developed.

But, alas, such a world is just as illogical as that in which a disillusioned school board supplies Paint-by-Number kits to willing takers. We are, on the whole, sheep. We follow the path of least resistance, and that path definitely is the one where we’re told what to do, so we don’t have to think of it ourselves.

And so, in this imperfect world of ours, why on earth is the average child going to get excited about exploring circles on his own, when he can take note of a few crucial formulas, do the problems, and not be required to do terribly much more? Sure, the work is dull, but then he can get it over with and then go out to play.

Why? The answer is simple: who, besides the hard-core mathematicians, actually views mathematics as art, let alone appreciates it as such? We might not all be artists, but we recognize paintings, music. We listen to songs every day on the radio, hang art on our walls, pay homage to the generations of artistic progression in museums and halls of fame.

Mathematics has, unfortunately, enjoys no such luxury. The work that mathematicians over thousands of years gave is reduced to a few formulas that we now take for granted. The only homage that it gets is the ceremonial unloading of the year’s math tests into the trash can.

But what’s more important is the actual prevalence of the arts. We might not all be ‘art people’. Some of us can’t carry a tune to save our lives. Others never graduated beyond stick figures. In schools, we’re required to take a few paltry arts credits, but nothing more. We might take art, or band, or choir for a couple of years; we let it go when our schedules can’t handle it. It’s extra.

Whereas, I think it is fair to say that, though math ¬is art to some, it has also become a necessary skill. From calculating a restaurant tip to figuring out interest, math is something every person does need to know.

Despite the cliché, it is reasonably appropriate to say that you can’t have your cake, and eat it too. Transforming our rigid math curriculum into some free-flowing abstraction might well be more effective. However, math is more than an art. It is necessary. Thus, we can’t simply treat it like we would a painting class.

Allow me to explain: if you can’t paint, you don’t sweat it, because it is not imperative to your survival in society that you know how. You certainly don’t try to get better if you don’t want to. But math is necessary. It is simply not acceptable for us to let it fall to the wayside.

Are we ready to lose math? I don’t think so; I don’t think we ever will be. The day that we do so is the day that our society begins to regress instead of moving forward. So: sorry, Lockhart. It was a good idea. But I’m not quite ready to give up my formulas yet.