# Tony’s Take November 2022

## This month’s topics:

### Math education in The New Yorker.

The New Yorker staff writer Jay Caspian Kang has two recent pieces on the magazine’s website about mathematics education in the United States. How Math Became an Object of the Culture Wars (Nov. 15, 2022) and What Do We Really Know about Teaching Kids Math? (Nov. 18).

In the first installment, Kang starts in 1915 and follows the ebb and flow of various progressive math education movements. Initially it seemed that Euclid would be jettisoned along with Caesar and Cicero as abstract material once deemed healthy for developing critical thought, but irrelevant to modern life. Then, during and after World War II, technology (computers, for example) showed mathematical skills to be important after all; the problem was how to implant them in the population. In response, the “new math” movement, started in the early 1950’s (Robert Hayden’s A history of the “new math” movement in the United States covers its genesis in detail) and greatly accelerated by the intellectual panic following the Sputnik launch, emerged as an attempted solution. As Kang observes, “The same fight has repeated itself on several occasions since then.”

In the current iteration, the discussion has expanded from pedagogy to include equity, because of the realization that the American student body is not homogeneous. Changes in curriculum and delivery will impact students from different segments of society in different, and sometimes inadvertently harmful, ways. For example, the draft plans for California’s elementary and secondary math education guidelines were “criticized by the usual suspects … but also many equity-focussed educators who worry that the program may be seen as a slackening of expectations for minority and low-income students.”