According to a survey done a few months ago, 56 % of America doesn't want to teach its children Arabic numerals (while another 15 % didn't care to comment either way). That means that only 29 % of Americans actually want to teach their children Arabic numerals.
Of course, Arabic numerals are the 0 to 9 system that the world has adopted, and while its origins is in India, al-Khawārizmī (d. 850) saw the value of this system and promoted it in his book, "On the Calculation with Hindu Numerals;" shortly thereafter the Arab mathematician and philosopher Al-Kindi, wrote "On the Use of the Hindu Numerals." These two authors suggested symbols for these numbers that we are all familiar with, and also added (or popularized) the '0' to make it into the familiar ten-digit system that the globe universally uses. The word 'zero' comes from the Arabic 'sifr'.
Since Arab/Islaimic civilization was a global one, and since Arabic works on mathematics and physics were eventually translated into Latin (along with many other works, which helped push Europe out of the Dark Ages and eventually sparked many intellectual movements that lead to the Renaissance and Reformation), these numerals were then also adopted by Europe, and hence were called by them 'Arabic numerals'.
But, since so many Americans seem to want to get rid of this system, let us - since this is a democracy after all - give them what they want. After all, surely we cannot ignore LVI percent of the population! America is a large country with over CCC million people living in it, and especially as we are now in the year MMXX, we simply cannot ignore the wishes of our people. Let our children learn simple Latin math again, and learn to add numbers together, for who amongst us doesn't enjoy MCDXLI + MCMLXXXVIII = MMMCDXXIX (and just wait till we get into the joys of division and multiplication 😎).
In other news, discussions were underway to remove calculators, clocks, cleanliness and personal hygiene, universities, and yes, even coffee, from the lives of these Americans - after all, all were given to us by those pesky Arab Muslims 😋.
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