The word “lesson” came back to Pooh as one he had heard before somewhere. “There’s a thing called Twy-stymes”, he said. “Christopher Robin tried to teach it to me once, but it didn’t.” A. A. Milne.

In assessing the value of the mathematics taught in schools, considerable emphasis is normally given to the use which a minority will later make of it in their jobs. It is the purpose of this article to point out that even those who never use mathematics professionally could better understand important social issues if they had a good basic training in mathematics. This is illustrated by a set of mathematical models related to one such problem— the population explosion.