Skipped heartbeats, profusive sweating and nausea may be symptomatic of a condition more crippling than arrhythmia. The person might just be suffering from a disease called arithmophobia - a fear of numbers and, by extension, mathematics. Typical triggers include school examinations, homework, an invitation from the teacher to solve a problem on the blackboard, and so on. The spectre of mathematics often looms large over childhood. This has been confirmed by yet another survey which was conducted by Cuemath, a learning programme. The study found that 89 per cent of parents feel that maths is the toughest subject for their children; 77 per cent also blame faulty teaching methods in schools for this.

The latter claim may have some truth in it. Numbers are abstract; making a child memorize number names and shapes does not mean he/she understands the numbers. Maths, thus, refuses to be tamed by rote-learning, which has, unfortunately, become the norm when it comes to school education. The teaching of maths needs to be application-based. Hearteningly, the National Council of Educational Research and Training has developed a module to make maths lessons at the nursery and primary levels more playful and exploratory. But this is not enough. Overburdened teachers seldom have the time - the syllabus must be completed before the annual assessment - to wait for a student who might not have grasped a key concept. Since maths concepts build upon themselves, once a child is forced to move on before one of these is clear, it is all downhill from there.

Maths, though, is not the only subject in which students falter because of the rickety structure of India's education system. Languages are the other victims of rushed readings of texts and crammed-up answers. However, they do not evoke the same sense of dread that maths does. It is here that another finding of the study assumes significance. At least 81 per cent of those surveyed placed utmost importance on the marks their child receives in maths, followed by science subjects. The choices are illuminating; subjects associated with the 'sciences' are built up to the extent where children feel extreme pressure to perform well in these and a failure to do so is associated with a failed future. Past anxieties and aspirations of parents are passed on to children along with a fear of maths.

Fortunately, the fear of maths is not omnipresent like the uses of the subject. Thousands of illiterate and semi-literate people think nothing of putting two and two together on a daily basis. A study of working children found that 90 per cent of them can get decently complicated calculations for transactions right in the first attempt. However, when these same children were asked to take a written test, their performance dipped dramatically. Street maths is easier because a concrete concept - say the value of 10 apples - can be matched with the abstract notion of a number. Inability to relate to numbers starts at the elementary level and the consternation worsens over time, erecting the bogey of mathematics as a subject meant only for the gifted.