Today we live in a society that is largely shaped by mathematics -- though by one of life's paradoxes, the more important mathematics has become in our lives, the more it has disappeared into the background. You would not know it unless you looked closely, but large parts of modern communications, transport, medicine, entertainment, sport, financial trading, and even law enforcement, all make heavy use of, often sophisticated mathematics. In the industrial age, we burned fossil fuels to drive the engines of society. In the information age, the fuel we burn is mathematics. The mathematics involved is so specialized that we cannot hope to teach it in our schools. What we can -- and should -- do is make sure our children are prepared to acquire, quickly and efficiently, what particular math skills they require when the time comes.
The bulk of that basic skill set on which each individual can build in later life has little to do with numbers or arithmetic. The industrial age was an age of number and arithmetic. The information age is quite different. The mathematics used today is the mathematics of abstract patterns, relationships, and structures. As we continue to revise our curriculum for the high school math class of the next millennium, we have to accept the fact that the mathematics we teach today's students will not be (at least, should not be) the same as their parents learned. But that does not make it easier or less rigorous. Quite the opposite.
The need for accurate, rigorous, precise logical thinking is more important to more people today than at any time in history. To try to achieve that ability by harking back to the mathematics taught a half century ago, as continues to happen in states across the nation, will surely fail with today's students. They -- and we -- deserve better.
Keith Devlin; Devlin's Angle, MAA
|
|
