Chad Orzel has a couple interesting posts about the relative value of literacy versus numeracy in both society and the academy.

…I do think there is an imbalance here, and it bothers me. If a student were to come in and say “You know, I just can’t handle literature classes. I’m no good at reading, and I’m not comfortable with it, so I don’t want to take any English classes,” most faculty would think that there’s something wrong with that person. And yet, I hear functionally equivalent statements about math every time I bring this subject up. Bright people will say “I think science is really neat, but I just can’t handle math,” and see nothing wrong with that.

If a student professed a distaste for reading as frankly as some express their distaste for math, we’d think that they were intellectually stunted. Illiteracy is a sign of a learning disability, while innumeracy is shrugged off as just one of those things.

I do think that one could argue that in fact much of critical theory in literature is unadulterated crap. Does anyone think that it would be as easy (or even possible) for an English major to hoax a physics paper as it was for Alan Sokal to mock postmodernists? Clearly Sokal understood much more about the literary theories (to the slight degree that they’re not nonsense) than any of the humanity professors will ever know about physics–at least enough to pull the wool over their eyes.

What’s dismaying to me is that for many, it’s not only acceptable to have no ability at math, but many take perverse pride in it, and are often rewarded both in academia and in life.

[via Derek Lowe, who has additional commentary.]