The Math Meltdown

The growing fear of mathematics threatens to lock Kashmiri students out of tomorrow's world.

- Gulzar Ahmad Dar

Something is slowly slipping away in Kashmir classrooms. Mathematics, once seen as the purest and most reliable subject, is losing its place in our students’ lives.

Across the valley, more and more students are turning their backs on math at the senior secondary level. They see it not as a door to opportunity, but as a subject to escape. They are not just struggling, they are deliberately avoiding it.

This is not just a classroom issue. It is a creeping educational crisis.

Students in Kashmir carry a growing fear of mathematics, and the way we teach the subject is making it worse.

For many, math feels like an enemy—difficult, cold, and far removed from the world they know.

The teaching methods that dominate our schools still rely on memorizing formulas and pushing through problem sets without explaining why the numbers matter.

Children who don’t understand math in their early years carry that fear with them for life. It shapes how they see their own abilities. It locks them out of choices before they even know what those choices could be.

‘And yet, at the same time, Kashmir, like the rest of the world, is becoming more mathematical with each passing day.

Artificial intelligence, machine learning, robotics and data science are not just distant fields. They are shaping the futures of the very students sitting in our classrooms. The apps we use, the services we depend on, the jobs that are coming, are built on math.