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S'està carregant… The new math : a political history (edició 2015)de Christopher J. Phillips
Informació de l'obraThe New Math: A Political History de 1959 July 15- Christopher Phillips Cap No hi ha cap discussió a Converses sobre aquesta obra.  cpg | Mar 31, 2022 |  Sense ressenyes | afegeix-hi una ressenya
An era of sweeping cultural change in America, the postwar years saw the rise of beatniks and hippies, the birth of feminism, and the release of the first video game. It was also the era of new math. Introduced to US schools in the late 1950s and 1960s, the new math was a curricular answer to Cold War fears of American intellectual inadequacy. In the age of Sputnik and increasingly sophisticated technological systems and machines, math class came to be viewed as a crucial component of the education of intelligent, virtuous citizens who would be able to compete on a global scale. In this history, Christopher J. Phillips examines the rise and fall of the new math as a marker of the period's political and social ferment. Neither the new math curriculum designers nor its diverse legions of supporters concentrated on whether the new math would improve students' calculation ability. Rather, they felt the new math would train children to think in the right way, instilling in students a set of mental habits that might better prepare them to be citizens of modern society-a world of complex challenges, rapid technological change, and unforeseeable futures. While Phillips grounds his argument in shifting perceptions of intellectual discipline and the underlying nature of mathematical knowledge, he also touches on long-standing debates over the place and relevance of mathematics in liberal education. And in so doing, he explores the essence of what it means to be an intelligent American-by the numbers. No s'han trobat descripcions de biblioteca. |
Debats actualsCapCobertes populars  
 Google Books — S'està carregant…GèneresClassificació Decimal de Dewey (DDC)510.71Natural sciences and mathematics Mathematics General Mathematics Education And Research EducationLCC (Clas. Bibl. Congrés EUA)ValoracióMitjana: (2.5)
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The book is certainly not a polemic, though. The author approaches the subject thoughtfully and stays above the fray himself. Although this book grew out of his dissertation, it certainly doesn’t read like a dissertation. It is very well-written and mostly free of cant.
Some nitpicks (with emphasis added):
p. 14: As an exception to the absence of cant, we have: “The epilogue also argues that the school curriculum, when properly historicized, grounds and interrogates otherwise abstract or vague discussions about political change.”
p. 19: “. . . how coherent progressive tenants were, . . .” Ouch!
p. 51: “. . . their project grew over the course of the 1930s into a series of volumes under the grandiose title Elements de mathematique”. Except for being in French, that’s a very typical title for a series of math books and nicely describes its content. If it’s grandiose, then mathematics is grandiose.
p. 77: Here the author makes a rare nod to identity politics: “Textbook writers often operated in the realm of the ideal, imagining how the material might shape an archetypal student. In the case of math textbooks, this image entailed a genderless, raceless, classless version of the student body, a vision not tied to particular schools or individuals. Of course, this was a fiction. If a student was supposed to be trained to reason like a mathematician, it mattered that the mathematician at this time was overwhelmingly likely to be white, middle class, and male.”
p. 198: “NCTM recommended in 1976 that computers be available to students and in 1980 that calculators be available”. Can that be right? Computers before calculators? Wikipedia says that the first personal computers to get any appreciable market penetration were released in 1977. The high school classroom in which I was taught math from 1977 to 1980 contained no computer. (