This article presents a brief and concise history of mathematics education from the early 1900's to the present and outlines, and speculates at, the issues, problems, opposing views and struggles that surround math as a subject.
There are three distinct phases to note throughout the past century, the Progressive Reform (1910-40's), The New Math (1960's), and the "Math Wars" NCTM Standards Reform (1990's to present), as well as two main stances, progressive and conservative. A progressive view of mathematics is one of a better understanding and less memorization of strict rules, theorems and algorithms for the sake of fluency, which is more of a conservative approach. I personally believe that fluency will come with a deeper understanding of mathematics and that the two are not separate.
The reasons for the three aforementioned phases of math education throughout the past century are political reasons, i.e. the push for The New Math curriculum during the 1960's was largely influenced by the Cold War era and the Space Race, but they are also due to a number of reasons around a sort of math phobia.
Many people hear the word "math" and cringe. Some reasons for this sort of a reaction given in the article, which I agree with, are because math is hard, only a select elite need to know it, there is no shame felt for not knowing, or "liking" math, and there seems to be a stigma attached to those that like math, that they are socially awkward. Also, it is important to note that there is a flaw with our school system, in that teachers are teaching subjects that they are not really qualified to teach, such as mathematics. By allowing teachers to teach math when they are not qualified to, it is very likely that they may impart a view on their students which adds to this fear of math and a very destructive cycle is formed.
I don't feel that teaching math from either a progressive or a conservative stance really matters, but there should be a mixture of the both and I would probably lean a little towards the progressive. However, whatever way the teacher wants to teach the given curriculum they should have a good knowledge of math and they should have the goal of making math interesting for their students to break down the math phobia which is so prevalent in North American society.
Good points here. I am especially interested in the idea that people who like math are portrayed as socially awkward (which is demonstrably untrue -- just look at the highly socially adept people in our class!). I'm also very much interested in changing the system that puts math-phobic teachers in charge of math classes -- which is a crazy thing to do!
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