If you speak/read French, try to have a look at elementary/middle school math books from the 60's/70's in France. It was a disaster and forced a lot of kids to imagine they were bad at maths.
Eg. when teaching set theory, teachers were debating what should be a perfect representation of a set (is it an ellipse or circle... etc.?) Children were completely lost because of this.
If you don’t draw a perfect ellipse to represent a set then you had a bad mark and so on and so forth.
There is basically two solutions: reduce the quality of the material, or teach the teachers. I tend to prefer the second.
If you could prove me that there were more brilliant mathematicians educated in France during the 60's/70's compared to other periods, I'd be interested.
Even if this is the case (which I'm not sure), at least it's pretty clear it lowered the median (whether this is good or not is another debate ;)
Again, I'm not disputing what you are saying either, merely trying to understand what happened.
Is it still going on in French schools today? Or was it 60's/70's only?
> Is it still going on in French schools today? Or was it 60's/70's only?
Unless you are in a reaally elitist high school in Paris with a really old teacher, this should'nt happen nowadays.
The first thing I learned in the 1st year of schools were basic concepts of set theory. We were drawing circles, ellipses and Venn diagrams (even though we didn't call them like that) filled with images of apples, plums and cherries. Teachers explained to us what an intersection, union and set differences are and we were supposed to draw items into one set, but not in another set, etc.
I recall these exercises as funny and playful. They were similar to IQ tests in the sense that the exercise is logical, slightly entertaining, but highly abstract and loosely related to the world you know.
And I think this was the main issue. The 2nd topic we learned was simple arithmetics as in standard educational systems. However, at that time, I didn't see any relationship with the concepts of set theory.
Was the system any good? Hard to say. AFAIK, it was dropped after a few years. Eventually, I obtained a PhD in computer science, so at least, the system wasn't a complete disaster for me. :-)
Perhaps it made sense in ye olde days when many students would not go on to junior high.
- There was an American school about a lifetime ago that tried that strategy, and the principal claimed it worked fine.
- A general impression that before mass education it wasn't uncommon for people who got schooling to start years older than our start, with no impression that they learned arithmetic any worse. E.g. http://www.scientiasocialis.lt/pec/files/pdf/vol57/90-101.Pi... "In general the pupils began their arithmetical instruction at 10–11 and this education prosecuted for two years."
- Piaget's picture of stages of development (in my vague understanding) suggests that arithmetic beyond a very concrete level would be developmentally unnatural for younger kids, and more natural later. Apparently Montessori schools do better on this score?
- Unschoolers sometimes reach adulthood with less understanding of math than state-schoolers, but if the average is worse, I haven't heard of it. Anecdotally they're fine.
- Hate and ignorance of math is very widespread (I've read similar claims about average French people with their substantially different school system)
- This jibes with my general experience, having gone to school, etc.
- There's not much reason to expect a claim this far from mainstream to have been carefully studied. Maybe it has been and refuted -- I just don't very much respect the status quo and so I expect there are improvements that would 'easy' except for the obstacle that it's very hard to meaningfully change the system. And this strikes me as a plausible (though unambitious) one.
In my country I have been still learning from old schoobooks while classes below had new schoolbooks - thats why I remember that well.
Recently I have been helping 11 year old with classes (remote learning now). And my impression is that this top-down approach is still present but the schoolbook was full of practical life examples (money issues, understanding newspaper articles with pecentages and percent points etc.)