If anyone could not use pounds, shillings and pence they stood to lose out. Decimalisation was promoted as being easier, i.e. quicker to learn; no one base or combination of bases is easier to learn in any absolute sense, our natural propensity is for logarithmic thinking. My nonagenarian grandmother who could happily multiply and divide by ten never was able to understand ‘the new money.’ For many people it was simply habitual to think in pounds, shillings and pence.
Of course people’s average superior mental arithmetic was also due to a much more limited educational environment for many. Pupils left school at age 14 and were given a basic but firm grounding in arithmetic, whereas now they are taught some maths to pass exams with little or no regard to how much of what is learnt is retained. They had no technology to fall back on. A large proportion of the male adult population worked in skilled trades which also required a good basic working knowledge of maths and arithmetic. (Non-academic kids who apparently have no aptitude for maths, more often than not, find that they are quite competent in maths when they start to learn a skilled trade.) When did we acquire our cultural dislike of maths and by extension arithmetic and the belief that they are difficult (and unnecessary)?
It is the relationship between technology and the arithmetical/mathematical environment which negatively impacts arithmetical skills much as the relationship between technology and the food environment negatively impacts people’s physical health. Do the skills that we gain from technology, (which for most people means nothing more than that there is a calculator on their phone) compensate their loss of arithmetical skills?
