Response to "Battleground Schools"

As always with these readings, the first page always makes me stop and speculate. In this case, the reading mentions the "[oscillation] between two poles" in terms of mathematics education. For the purposes of this blog post, I will be using "conservative" and "progressive" much like the book has. When seeing this sentence, right off the bat I got déjà vu and thought:

"Wait a second, these are awfully similar to the Skemp and Lockhart articles! Though in Lockhart's case, it was more so a passionate lament. But both of these touched on a very similar dichotomy that I pointed out in my Lockhart's Lament response. While the side that Lockhart lamented over was instrumental mathematics that saved time, felt mass-produced, was sterile and completely devoid of art, the other pole that he longed for was one of exploration, inquiry, understanding, and everything else that the 'Progressive' column is represented by!"

This reading introduces yet another dimension to consider: the political dimension. In addition to my prior classifications, I can say that this too, is political. While right-wing politics favours the conservative school of mathematics education due to its emphasis on promoting workforce habits (ex. obedience, precision, correctness), I draw an association between left-wing politics and the progressive way. It got me thinking, now that this is the case: there has been a pendulum swinging of over a century between the two poles of mathematics education, with the same arguments being repeated. One would think that eventually, the soldiers would've settled on an agreement, so why does it keep oscillating? The realization here is that most likely, education will only be as stagnant as the political theatre surrounding it (i.e. not at all), and policies are all at the mercy of the political whims. This was further confirmed to me in the later parts of this reading, with political factors being at the heart of the reforms.

For my second set of stops, it was around the acknowledgement of math phobias and how they are formed due to various presumptions. When reading the presumptions listed, I could remember these being in play when I was in school (a time of more conservative-sided mathematics education). Yes, many people did see math as a stiff, soulless subject. Yes, there was an association between math and less savoury groups of people (ex. nerds). Et cetera. I've seen the stigma around mathematics affect people like my mother and sister who have resigned themselves to being "not math people" (despite them having a good grasp of everyday math like money splitting). I thought about the idea of math phobia here, and maybe the oscillations happen towards the progressive side because the math phobia buildup reaches a critical mass. From the reforms described later in the reading, symptoms of math phobia were addressed by reformists who wanted to reduce the stiffness of math and make it a subject of thoughtful experimentation. Math phobia definitely feels like the greatest argument against conservative mathematics education, since it's often the root motivator behind the reforms oscillating to the other side.

Finally, I had a stop at the start of the section on "Progressivist Reform". My first thought was that it's neat that these ideas of progressive-leaning mathematics education go back a long time! The things we are learning in teacher education today are actually not recent concepts. As a testament to this, I saw the name Dewey and vaguely remembered seeing it on a citation in one of my course's readings. These are the same readings that get discussed and considered by teacher candidates like myself in the year 2024, which reinforces the claim that similar arguments get repeated regardless of the time period. Considering that we are entering a swing to the progressive side in BC, the parallels are genuinely intriguing to see, and I feel seen by the people of the past.

Reading further into the history of these reforms, my question of how society accepts oscillations back to the conservative side was addressed. It seems that an urge to have a state's society be advanced for whatever reason (in the case of New Math, to not fall behind the USSR by raising students into potential rocket scientists) would have us inspecting the curriculum and declaring it too narrow. It was quite something to see that calculus in high schools was likely a result of this conservative math education reform. Unfortunately, the way New Math was set up made it so it was doomed to oscillate away -- no one could understand what was being taught! This was the funniest part to me, since the New Math reform felt so short-sighted in hindsight. It also assumed that most kids could and would become rocket scientists that attended university, which also brings up a good point: conservative math education has benefits in higher education, so there is a top-down dynamic happening here. If the politics deem it best for more people to attend university (like with the time of New Math), then there would be an oscillation towards conservative math. This was certainly not the case by the last reform in the reading, and the NCTM seemed to relax the pendulum swings while straying from the political landscape of their time. I liked that they tried to strike a middle ground by maintaining some demand for competence in common areas, but also promoted different types of assessment, formative assessment, meaningful activities, and more. It has many parallels with the BC mathematics curriculum.