The unexpected reason why 56% of Americans are against learning Arabic numerals in school

More than half of respondents to a Civic Science survey said Arabic numerals should not be taught in school. Most likely, the respondents responded to the word “Arabic,” but not everyone knows that this is the name for the numbers that residents of the United States and the vast majority of countries in the world consider “ordinary” - from 0 to 9.

Фото: Depositphotos

Arabic numerals are ubiquitous in the United States. You may see them in the title of this article, in the publication date, or on any digital watch. In short, according to Merriam-Webster's definition, an Arabic numeral is “any of the number symbols 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9,” writes Snopes.

Therefore, many were shocked when a screenshot appeared on the Web, where 56% of respondents from America opposed Arabic figures in American schools.

These are the real results of a survey conducted by Civic Science. John Dick, a Twitter user who originally published a screenshot of the data, is the CEO of this company.

The full survey is currently unavailable, but Dick has published several other interesting results, and also partially highlighted the purpose of the survey.

“The purpose of this experiment was to identify prejudices among those who do not understand the issue,” he said.

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Dick shared the results of another interesting survey, which showed that 53% of respondents (of which 73% of Democrats) believe that schools in America should not teach "the theory of creation of the world from the Catholic priest Georges Lemetra" as part of a scientific curriculum.

Just as respondents to the Arabic numerals survey probably didn't understand what they were talking about, those answering the question about the "theory of creation" clearly didn't know that the theory was about explaining the expansion of the universe, not about the divine principle. This theory is now known as the Big Bang Theory.

Although some commentators have argued that these questions are incomparable, Dick believes that they both illustrate how tribalism affects the answers of people who misunderstand the questions. (Tribalism is a form of group insularity characterized by internal insularity and exclusivity, usually accompanied by hostility towards other groups - Wikipedia).

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The story of the Arabic numerals was reminiscent of another viral questionnaire conducted by the Public Policy Survey (PPS) in December 2015. It showed that 41% of Donald Trump supporters (and 19% of Democrats) were in favor of bombing the city of Agrabah. This city is a fictional town from the Disney cartoon about Aladdin.

As ForumDaily wrote earlier:

• In July, 2018, a well-known comedian and TV presenter Jimmy Kimmel, decided to conduct a survey of passers-by on the streets of American cities for his show - they were shown the political map of the world without signatures of countries and asked to name any state, pointing at it.
• As it turned out, the Americans cannot map any country in the world, not even the United States. By this link is there a video!

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