Innumeracy, Illiteracy, and the Digital Divide

I have for many years now noted the cultural bias that allows innumeracy to be acceptable ("I don't get math", "I don't know which is smaller 10^-5 or 10⁵") but illiteracy to be shameful ("I can't parse a paragraph", "I don't know the difference between a noun or a verb").  This is best argued by C.P. Snow in his famous "Two Cultures" essay on the acceptable nature of scientific ignorance as compared to the stigma of, for example, not knowing any Shakespeare.  I have for many years felt confident that science and math were on the losing end of some larger culture war. But...

It is true that students these days have very little sense of number.  A lot of it, I think, is due to lack of basic math skills: ask them what 6 x7 is and they will reach for a calcuator.  Why should students "waste" their time memorizing math operations when calculators of all kinds are so readily available?  I always argue that a sense of number is built precisely out of having these basic skills and have always imagined that our culture of "innumeracy is okay" has enabled this behaviour. 

This week I discovered that I am wrong.  My freshmen are taking turns presenting to the class using google doc's presentations.  It turns out there is no spell checker built in.  I have been a fool - it's not that students can't mulitply without computational help: it turns out they can't spell either!  Word processors have done to them what calculators have been doing to them for years.

I wanted numeracy to be raised to the level of literacy.  Instead literacy is being lowered to level of numeracy...

Maybe the digital divide that everyone talks about will not be between those who have access to the technology and those who do not, but rather it will be between those that use the technology as an enabling tool and those that use technology as a blinding crutch.