Curricular Innovations: Stepping Forward, Then Stepping Back

The New Math.

Although the curricular movement which came to be known as new math began in the late 1960s, the reforms did not permeate most of the school systems until the 1970s, when the big textbook companies began to publish math materials based almost exclusively on this innovation. The creators of the new-math curriculum were opposed to the view that the main object of mathematics instruction was arithmetic proficiency. The new-math approach put theory before practice, with a great deal of exposure to sophisticated concepts such as set theory, number theory, and symbolic logic. The belief was that if theory came before practice, all math reasoning would fall into place, including computation. This purely intellectual approach was touted as being more fun than memorizing the "hows" of arithmetic. In 1973 Stanford professor Edward Begle, called the "father of new math," argued that computation was a mute point anyway, since...

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