Posted by:
Wally Prince
(
)
Date: May 14, 2019 12:36AM
It's not a good reflection on schools in general that you can do a poll (assuming it was legitimately structured) that can get a result where 56% of the respondents have no idea what "Arabic numerals" are, but feel like they have to have an opinion on it anyway. Worse of the 44% who were okay with Arabic numerals being taught in school, you just know that some percentage of them answered that way because they wanted to be nice and inclusive--not because they actually had any understanding of what they were really being asked about.
Of course legitimate arguments can be made about whether "Arabic numerals" is an accurate term for referring to the symbols currently used for numbers throughout most of the world, since they are actually traced back to origins in India.
https://www.quora.com/Do-Arabic-numerals-actually-have-an-Arabic-originhttps://www.britannica.com/topic/Hindu-Arabic-numeralsIf some of the respondents thought the question was referring to Eastern Arabic, Perso-Arabic or Urdu numerals, rather than "Western Arabic" numerals, their response actually would not be particularly dumb (if the poll question was worded in a way that made it sound like the "Arabic numerals" would be taught instead of the current system).