I run a microschool and also teach maths there. I love this essay, and book, but by focusing on maths as art, it focuses on only one aspect of meaning. The larger issue with the way maths is taught, and especially maths, is that it is all mechanics. Now for a certain set of students, those mechanics are incredibly beautiful. Prime numbers have a seduction to them! A few more can be introduced to this beauty and aesthetics, but many are still not into it, and that's entirely okay. What's needed for kids to see and start accepting it is meaning. And meaning comes from connection to the real world. This is why kids who are unschooled but work in shops become great at arithmetic. It's part of their daily web of life. No amount of sanitized exposure to abstract aspects, however aesthetically dressed up will help most. The mind needs to answer "why do i need to care about this" to be open to learning. And this is not something that can come with instruction. It is lived experience, culture. To fix maths education,and any education, you need to bring in meaning before mechanics. Unfortunately the curriculum, assesment, and therefore teaching inevitably end up with focus on the mechanics, which is the wrong end. It is meaning > motivation > mechanics > measurement

School inverts this. And that's a tragedy.

Wrote about it here. https://blog.comini.in/p/schooling-has-a-meaning-crisis-para...