Strange times
Jul. 12th, 2005 08:55 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
undyingkingI came onto this via a comment to Pepys's Diary, but it sort of crystallized something I'd been wondering about for quite some time, namely the (apparent) relative recency of familiarity with simple multiplication techniques.
If you look at this page and go down to where it talks about Robert Recorde, you'll see a discussion of the then (16th century) method for multiplying things like 8 by 7. More than a century later, Pepys, who is at this stage a 29-year old with a degree from Cambridge working as (the equivalent of) a financial manager, is having private classes to learn the arcana of 'the multiplicacion tables'.
What I find difficult to understand is: nowadays (or, actually, I don't know about nowadays, but certainly when I was at school) we think it routine for 6-year-olds to be taught 'times tables', so why was it so unfamiliar just 300 years earlier? Of course, utility considerations would have precluded its teaching to the bulk of people labouring in the fields etc, but surely the time it takes to learn the products up to 10 * 10 would have been well spent for anyone working in commerce or manufacture? And Recorde's method, linked above, is surely more involved than just learning the table of numbers would be?
Or is it something like: people so took abaci for granted that curiosity about how to multiply numbers by hand would have been seen as a bit of an eccentric waste of time?
If you look at this page and go down to where it talks about Robert Recorde, you'll see a discussion of the then (16th century) method for multiplying things like 8 by 7. More than a century later, Pepys, who is at this stage a 29-year old with a degree from Cambridge working as (the equivalent of) a financial manager, is having private classes to learn the arcana of 'the multiplicacion tables'.
What I find difficult to understand is: nowadays (or, actually, I don't know about nowadays, but certainly when I was at school) we think it routine for 6-year-olds to be taught 'times tables', so why was it so unfamiliar just 300 years earlier? Of course, utility considerations would have precluded its teaching to the bulk of people labouring in the fields etc, but surely the time it takes to learn the products up to 10 * 10 would have been well spent for anyone working in commerce or manufacture? And Recorde's method, linked above, is surely more involved than just learning the table of numbers would be?
Or is it something like: people so took abaci for granted that curiosity about how to multiply numbers by hand would have been seen as a bit of an eccentric waste of time?
