Who will win the Varkey Foundation’s million-dollar “best teacher” prize this week in Dubai? Hot favourite is Britain’s star maths teacher, Colin Hegarty, whose videos are followed by a million viewers worldwide. Hegarty has been hailed as the great hope for British maths.

Like much of the public realm, British maths is “in crisis”. The country is languishing alongside America way down every league table. Evidence of this was cited in a new poll from YouGov, measuring the public’s knowledge of maths, science and English. In maths, roughly a third of those surveyed had no idea how to calculate a mode, a median, a “line of best fit” or the area of a circle.

I seriously doubt this poll, since it implies that two-thirds did know the answers. All on whom I tested it failed, including myself. Nor could they see the point. With one voice they replied: “That’s the sort of thing you learned at school.” So what is the point? It merely ensures that many pupils, like the bright child of a friend of mine with maths blindness, have their schooling undermined by the government’s fixation with maths.

Colin Hegarty has been shortlisted for the $1m Varkey Foundation teacher prize. Photograph: Linda Nylind/The Guardian

There is nothing, except religion, as conservative as a school curriculum. It is drenched in archaic prejudice and vested interest. When the medieval church banned geography as an offence against the Bible, what had been the queen of the sciences never recovered. Instead Latin dominated the “grammar” curriculum into the 20th century, to the expense of all science. Today maths is the new Latin.

Science at least improved. In 1988 Thatcher hailed a “dash for science” to halt the decline in young people opting for science subjects. It failed completely. Then in 2006 a radical new GCSE syllabus dragged school science away from test tubes and Bunsen burners towards everyday life, to pollution, global warming, additives, health and diet. Since then the reactionaries have turned to maths as the talisman of educational success. It is in maths that we must beat the Chinese, the Singaporeans and the Finns. Pisa league tables of “top nations” are pored over. Maths teachers are paid more, have their loans written off, are entered for global prizes. No one dares mention the calculator.

Any league table that has China at the top, Britain at 26th and America at 36th tells me something more important than merely who is good at maths. If the US and Britain – among the most vigorous economies and most successful at science – are so bad at maths, it suggests their young people are applying themselves to something more useful. Chinese students are rushing to British and US universities to join them.

No one would argue that pupils should not be able to add, subtract and multiply. But I studied higher maths, from calculus to number theory, and have forgotten the lot. All the maths I have needed comes from John Allen Paulos’s timeless manual, Innumeracy. It is mostly how to understand proportion and risk, and tell when a statistician is trying to con you.

I agree with the great mathematician GH Hardy, who accepted that higher maths was without practical application. It was rather a matter of intellectual stimulus and beauty. A new book by Michael Harris, Mathematics Without Apologies, goes to the extremes of this stimulus, to the categorical ladder, incompleteness theory and the Black-Scholes equation, used to assess financial derivatives. It ends in the “inconsistency nightmare”, that nought might possibly equal one.

We accept the need for maths in advanced physics and in computing algorithms, much as we accept Greek for archaeology and Anglo-Saxon for early literature. The “mathematics of finance” school at Columbia University is lavishly sponsored by Wall Street firms, for good reason. But that does not mean every primary pupil must spend hours, indeed years, trying to learn equations and πr2, which they soon forget through disuse. Maths is for specialists, so why instil arithmophobia in the rest?

Charge the maths lobby with the uselessness of its subject and the answer is a mix of chauvinism and vacuity. Maths must be taught if we are to beat the Chinese (at maths). Or it falls back on primitivism, that maths “trains the mind”. So does learning the Qur’an and reciting Latin verbs.

Meanwhile, the curriculum systematically denies pupils what might be of real use to them and society. There is no “need” for more mathematicians. The nation needs, and therefore pays most for, more executives, accountants, salesmen, designers and creative thinkers.

At the very least, today’s pupils should go into the world with a knowledge of their history and geography, their environment, the working of their bodies, the upbringing of children, law, money, the economy and civil rights.

This is in addition to self-confidence, emotional intelligence and the culture of the English imagination. All are crowded out by a political obsession with maths.

The reason is depressingly clear. Maths is merely an easy subject to measure, nationally and internationally. It thus facilitates the bureaucratic craving for targetry and control. The prominence of maths in the curriculum is education’s version of Orwell’s imaginary boot, “stamping on your face … forever”.