[Lady Lucky]

We are missing the real boat here....numbers matter, but you need to associate them with real things.

Rocks, ruminants and roots are real things. So are rockets and radios. Algebra won't teach you the difference between the two sets, but then, without algebra there would not be two such sets.

[Reily]

One of the great intellectual “breakthroughs” in human thinking was to separate “numbers” from “things”. The point being that numbers are more then just convenient scratches on writing media for counting. They have “meaning” and properties over and above keeping track of say “sheep”.