Summary: Battleground Schools

             The article describes two equally strong but polarized views of math education in 20th century North America, particularly the US.   The prevailing view at any given point in history depends on the current political and economic state of the US and the global scenario.  Hence the terrors of fascism in the 1940s together with  increasing migration, urbanization and industrialization,  rendered the static, rigid curriculum  wholly inadequate, spawned a distrust for the infallible teacher and called for a paradigm shift to a  more meaningful, practical education by "doing math."  John Dewey figured prominently in the progressivist reform of early to mid-20th c.

           Then a second major shift came in the post-war 60s when the US dominance in the global arena is threatened by Russia's seeming superior technological capabilities.  Heavily influenced by the ultra-conservative, highly elitist Bourbaki group, math sentiment swung to the conservative end, where abstraction reign, and university-level math is injected in K-12 curriculum to bring out the scientist in every student.  Its tentacles reached far and wide to Europe and developing countries, where suitability to local conditions  invariably posed a problem, as both the teachers, parents and students were ill-prepared to handle the the high-level abstraction,  perhaps appreciated (and understood) only by those headed for university physics or math.

          Discontent with the  impracticability of the New Math to most students, a third seismic shift  began in the late 1970s, spilling into the next 2 decades.  Back-to-basics, mandated national standards, and  teacher and school accountability were the new buzz words.  NCTM  played a stellar role in the US when it developed its own standards program after innumerable consultations with education stakeholders:  math teachers, parents, administrators, education specialists.  NCTM's huge impact is such that it served as a model to develop curricular standards for other subject areas, as well as serving a focal reference for many of the states in the US, in Canada, as well as developing countries.  NCTM is heavily leaned on the progressive end where sense-making, original thinking, conceptual understanding, exploratory process and meaningful problem solving are the emphasized more than teacher-constructed algorithm, fluency, end-answers.

       As good as this sounds, discontent will always be there, which is expected as we adapt to changing national and global scenarios.  Such was the case when the TIMSS results showed dismal performance of  the US and the traditional superpowers, compared to the top performance of recent world players and emerging economies of  Singapore, Taiwan and South Korea.  Some western economies are closely monitoring  Asian classrooms, and how they can possibly import some lessons in their quest for a better math education.