Mathematics in School and University

Extract

We have all heard the scheme recommended to Headmasters for their guidance in making the first three reports on a new pupil. The first should be devastating in order to impress the parent with the toughness of the job that the school is up against in remedying the defects in the earlier training of the pupil. The second should be glowing in order to show the progress made when the boy gets to the right school. The third should be very guarded in order to moderate any undue optimism created by the second, and to make it clear that any failure that may lie in the future will be due solely to lack of aptitude or application on the part of the pupil. I fear that some of my colleagues in the universities are prone to adopt a similar line of defence. Certainly one not infrequently hears in college common rooms of the shockingly incompetent teaching given in the schools in this subject or in that. One may sometimes suspect that this is a professional particularisation of the proposition that “all good workmen have bad tools”, though every beginner in logic knows that this may not be simply converted to “all who have bad tools are good workmen” Even if the teachers are as bad as some would have us believe, we professors who have had a hand in the training of so many of them had better keep rather quiet about it.