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Wall Street Journal Lead Editorial
(Lire la traduction)
January 4, 2000
MATH WARS
So you've got thirteen,
And you take away seven,
And that leaves five...
...Well, six actually.
But the idea is the important thing.
--"New Math"
by Tom Lehrer (1965)
Reinventing math is an old tradition in this country. It has been around at least
since the 1960s, when the inimitable Tom Lehrer mocked the New Math in Berkeley cafes.
Even Beatniks understood that a method that highlights concepts at the expense of
plain old calculation would add up to trouble. And, as it happened, the New Math's
introduction in schools across the country coincided with the onset of a multi-year
decline in math scores.
Today the original New Math is old hat, but many folks in the education world are
hawking yet another reform. It is known by names like "Connected Math,"
or "Everyday Math." Not surprisingly, the New New Math has a lot in common
with the Old New Math. Like its forerunner, it focuses on concepts and theory, scorning
textbooks and pencil-and-paper computation as "rote drill." And like its
forerunner, today's New Math has powerful allies. Education Secretary Richard Riley
and other Clintonites smile on it. Eight of the 10 curriculums recently recommended
for nationwide use by an influential Education Department panel teach the New New
Math.
Not that all members of the Academy are joining the movement. Within weeks of the
Education Department findings, 200 mathematicians and scientists, including four
Nobel Prize recipients and two winners of a prestigious math prize, the Fields Medal,
published a letter in the Washington Post deploring the reforms. More are now rallying
on an opposition Website, "mathematicallycorrect.com".
And well they might. For programs of the sort picked by the federal panel turn out
to be horrifyingly short on basics.
Consider MathLand, which won a "promising" rating from the panel. Its literature
says it focuses on "attention to conceptual understanding, communication, reasoning
and problem solving." This sounds harmless, but consider: MathLand does not
teach standard arithmetic operations. No carrying and borrowing at the blackboard
here. Instead, children are supposed to meet in small groups and invent their own
ways to add, subtract, multiply and divide. This detour is necessary, the handbook
informs, to spare youngsters the awful subjugation of "teacher-imposed rules."
MathLand also does away with textbooks--too hierarchical, we suppose. No chance therefore
for anything as sane as systematic review.
Next comes Connected Math, another panel favorite. It too skips or glosses over crucial
skills. Example: The division of fractions, an immutable prerequisite for algebra,
is absent from its middle-school curriculum. In shutting the door to algebra, David
Klein of Cal State Northridge points out, "Connected Math also closes doors
to careers in engineering and science for its graduates."
Finally there is Everyday Math. No textbooks here, either. Everyday Math ensures
juvenile dependency to calculators by endorsing their use from
kindergarten. Rather than teach long division, the program devotes substantial time
to that important area of math study, self-esteem. A Grade 5 worksheet asks students
to fill in the blanks on the questions below:
A. If math were a color, it would be ________, because ______.
B. If it were a food, it would _______, because _____.
C. If it were weather, it would be ______, because, _______.
We'll allow a pause here for primal screams.
And then move on to the main question: Why? The reason for the New New Math, as for
many other curriculum reforms, is that teachers, school administrators and their
unions are tired of being blamed for statistical declines and poor student performances.
So with math, as in their campaign to dumb down the SAT, such educators work to destroy
or reject the standards that brought them trouble in the first place. Children are
different nowadays, goes the line, and cannot be measured by old benchmarks.
New Mathie and federal panel member Steven Leinwand explains: "It's time to
recognize that, for many students, real mathematical power, on the one hand, and
facility with multidigit, pencil-and-paper computational algorithms, on the other,
are mutually exclusive." Or, as Professor Klein translates: "Underlying
their programs is an assumption that minorities and women are too dumb to learn real
mathematics."
Fortunately, America is not France, where a central government controls every aspect
of schooling down to the color of the paper clips. Localities and states write their
own curriculums, and can and do fight back against the New Math. California for example,
reversed a calculator-friendly policy in grammar schools after scores dropped precipitously.
Resource-rich families, too, one suspects, will find ways to compensate for what
trendy schools omit. Still, New Math will take its casualties, especially among the
poor, adding to the already mounting costs of the decline in national educational
standards.
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