Divide and Conquer

I was troubled by Nicholson Baker’s essay calling for the elimination of Algebra II from high school curricula [“Wrong Answer,” September], which fails to acknowledge the great value of a math education. The late Earl Shorris, a former contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine, understood math’s importance, and when he founded the Clemente Course in the Humanities, a college-level curriculum for people living in poverty, he asked me to develop a math class for his students. As he rightly observed, mathematics belongs among the humanities. He wanted to use math to teach students to think abstractly, and I…