DA VINCI WAS A DOUBLE MAJOR

After a decade of parents rushing to enroll their children in specialized math classes, and university humanities departments in crisis mode, a radical education movement is taking hold. Why not have students study Shakespeare and the quadratic formula? Prepare for a new Renaissance generation

- NICOLE LAPORTE

A few years ago, when Alex, an academically minded Manhattan mother, first hired a math tutor for her son after he was placed in seventh grade advanced math at the prestigious Collegiate School on the Upper West Side, it was not, she said, an example of competitive parenting. Her son had shown an aptitude for math on the school’s placement test but then flubbed the first two exams he took once school was underway. “I just wanted him to get an A- or a B+,” Alex said recently.

She quickly learned, however, just how competitive the math game has become in places like New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and other cosmopolitan hubs populated by moneyed strivers. When Alex (her name has been changed) tried to hire the tutor that “everyone” at Collegiate used, she said that parents turned mum. “Getting the tutor’s number was a nightmare. It was so coveted. It was like trying to get Jackie Kennedy’s Social Security number.” She finally managed to obtain the sacred digits one evening over drinks with a fellow mom—it took alcohol to shake the information free. But the hurdles didn’t end there. The tutor was so booked that the only time she could see Alex’s son was late on Sunday evenings.

Being a math nerd—in school or later in life—was once the definition of social marginality, a demarcation rife with ruthless stereotypes: the pocket calculator, the smudged glasses with bent frames. Even for those who were hypersuccessful mathletes, like Bill Gates, it wasn’t until this century that they became viewed as glamorous tech gods and global ambassadors. The video of the Microsoft Windows launch in 1995 is a study in ebullient but cringey math geeks gone wild: Gates and Steve Ballmer bop around a stage as they awkwardly pump the air to a Rolling Stones tune.