The Faulty Logic of the ‘Math Wars’
23rd June 2013
The battle over math education is often conceived as a referendum on progressive ideals, with those on the reform side as the clear winners. This is reflected, for instance, in the terms that reformists employ in defending their preferred programs. The staunchest supporters of reform math are math teachers and faculty at schools of education. While some of these individuals maintain that the standard algorithms are simply too hard for many students, most take the following, more plausible tack. They insist that the point of math classes should be to get children to reason independently, and in their own styles, about numbers and numerical concepts. The standard algorithms should be avoided because, reformists claim, mastering them is a merely mechanical exercise that threatens individual growth. The idea is that competence with algorithms can be substituted for by the use of calculators, and reformists often call for training students in the use of calculators as early as first or second grade.
Reform math has some serious detractors. It comes under fierce attack from college teachers of mathematics, for instance, who argue that it fails to prepare students for studies in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) fields. These professors maintain that college-level work requires ready and effortless competence with the standard algorithms and that the student who needs to ponder fractions — or is dependent on a calculator — is simply not prepared for college math. They express outrage and bafflement that so much American math education policy is set by people with no special knowledge of the discipline.
The goal of pre-college education ought to be inculcation of those facts and skills that will make life easier for the ordinary citizen, including but not limited to getting a remunerative job and exercising good judgment in daily life. Treating every child in America as a potential trust-fund baby whose chief problem is how to best ‘actualize’ himself (or herself) is what has produced the massive illiteracy and innumeracy that plagues our population in These Degenerate Modern Times.
If I had a child, which thank God I don’t, I would bend every effort to keeping that child safe from anybody who had a degree in Education as I would from a carrier of a communicable disease.
Jerry Pournelle makes a good point:
The problem is that we no longer know what the public schools are for, and we no longer recognize that a good public school system would make high school the normal education for citizens, with junior colleges to teach skills not so easily learned in apprenticeships, colleges as the place for those who want more education or need some credentials to make a living (teachers, accountants) and universities for those who are seriously going into professions needing high levels of technical competence. Liberal arts colleges we will leave for another discussion – there are many publications on that.
But the essential point is that public education can’t give everyone the same education. We need not go to the extremes they have in Japan and other places where early examination scores determine the course of your education and your life from then on; but we do need to recognize that not everyone needs to know algebra and calculus, and trying to bestow that as a right is to doom the ones who should know it to being forced to learn at the pace of those who never will learn them.
I second Jerry’s recommendation to read Jacques Barzun’a A Teacher in America.