Summary and Reflections on "Battleground Schools"

The article titled “Battleground Schools” outlined the three attitudes that public education took to mathematics over the 20th Century. The three main movements are referred to as

1. The Progressivist movement for mathematics through activity and inquiry (circa 1910 – 1940)
- Criticized the old attitude of teaching students ‘how’ vs. ‘why’
- Sought to unify different topics and bring pure and applied math to classrooms
- Associated with John Dewey, Pestalozzi, Montessori: all wanted students to explore and experiment with math as part of a reflective inquiry
- Required teachers to be more organized as ideally students would be able to work with teacher-structured materials which would spark imagination and interpretation, where students are actively involved with movement, talking and activity
- Was respected but many classrooms continued on with traditional methods

2. The New Math reform movement of the 1960’s
- US wanted to compete with Soviet space exploration and needed stronger math students
- Rewrote mathematics teaching to be based in set theory, abstract algebra, linear algebra, calculus which was all brought into the K - 12 system
- Problems with this program was that many teachers at the time were not familiar with the concepts they were expected to teach, parents educated under the old system were not able to help, even at an elementary school level
- Served only to fail students who did not intend to continue in higher level math or sciences

3. The so-called “Math Wars” based on NCTM Standards reform, from the 1990’s to present
- back-to-basics curriculum
- standards set by math teachers to follow content that supported a balanced approach
- emphasized flexible problem-solving skills, mathematical representations, technologies
- meant to instill appreciation for mathematics, stressed understanding but still had focus in calculation
(p. 391)

The author(s) of the article blame the lack of cohesion in our math education system on a conservative vs. progressive stance in teaching mathematics. The conservative attitude focuses on a fluency in math, and is based in the idea that math is constant and infallible (p. 392); the progressive attitude, in turn, stresses a deeper understanding and emphasizes the importance of ‘exploration and inquiry’ (p. 392) and problem solving.

It is always interesting to learn about the history of the topic of study. Even though I had heard about some of the difficulties teachers had in math teaching, I was a little surprised by the descriptions of our past math programs. The system seems to moving in a circular fashion. What the teacher education program for math is promoting sounds highly familiar after having read about the Progressive system of style 1. It would seem prudent to amalgamate the attitudes and try a little of all three to allow for more exploration, more exposure to the challenging and abstract within the realm of realistic goals. However, the more we study this, the more I feel that the real difficulty of creating a balanced curriculum is in rectifying the attitude of the general public. The article discusses the general public’s ideas about math briefly, and highlights that society thinks of math as “hard, cold, distant and inhuman” and “only … appropriate for a small elite to understand” and that “those who like math are … eggheads, nerds, absent-minded professors and [the like]” (p. 393). There seems to be a lot of looking down on those who are able to understand math, which is highly bizarre: there are groups of people who specialize in other circles of expertise as well, why do they not suffer the same ridicule of social ineptitude that seems to plague the mathematical community? I have absolutely witnessed that “there is no shame, and lots of positive social valuation, for those who claim to be incapable of doing and understanding mathematics” (p. 393) and I find that positively preposterous. But until this disdainful attitude for the mathematical community dissolves, math education will continue to be an uphill battle for the students who struggle because society condones this defeatist attitude, though curiously, only in regards to math.