Battleground Schools

The first thing that jumped out at me when reading this article was the uncanny resemblance to American politics. That is, for some reason, lay people seem to be attracted to polarized camps of thought whether it comes to government or pedagogy, and the majority vote often swings back and forth like a pendulum between these extremes. This makes it difficult for those engaged in the nuanced discussion of what constitutes ideal mathematics pedagogy to proceed without immediately being labeled as a progressivist or traditionalist.

I also didn't realize that there was such a widespread call to re-develop mathematics education pre-WW2. The fact that highly intelligent and well-trained professionals and academics have been engaging in discussion about what constitutes ideal mathematics pedagogy for such a long time encourages me to do some more reading! I think there is a lot we can learn as new teachers by first looking back at this history, and also understanding how educational trends have responded to societal trends.

Lastly, I had no idea how big of an influence political/military goals had over math curriculum development such as was demonstrated in the adoption of the "New Math" in the Cold War era. Also, to me, the dramatic changes like the removal of geometry and diagrams seem incongruent with the goal of increasing abstract mathematical understanding. I think that Euclidean geometry is a great introduction into mathematical reasoning and abstraction. Moreover, I would imagine teaching set theory without diagrams incredibly difficult! Lastly, I find it very interesting that the legacy of algebra and functions/calculus focus of this era has persisted to this day in the common North American math curriculum. I wonder if there will be an analogous, economically driven change to increased focus on combinatorics and statistics, given the current data science and computing revolution (of course the change in curriculum will lag behind industry though).