Learning From History

It is instructive to challenge preconceived ideas with a look at history. The quotes below offer such a challenge and in doing so encourage us to ask how our own inability to change with the times will appear to others 100 years from now.

• Until within a few years no studies have been permitted in the day school but spelling, reading and writing. Arithmetic was taught by a few instructors one or two evenings a week. But in spite of the most determined opposition, arithmetic is now being permitted in the day school.

Philip S. Jones, ed., A History of Mathematics Education in the United States and Canada, National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, Washington, DC, 1970. [p.13]

 

• Those of high social rank, theoretically above the world of getting and spending, did not deign to study the subject. The most respectable English public schools, like Eton and Harrow, did not offer any instruction in arithmetic until well into the nineteenth century.

Patricia Cline Cohen, A Calculating People: The Spread of Numeracy in Early America, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1982