Secondary School Mathematics: an International Survey

Extract

Most of us here present today have been involved (facing one way or the other in the class-room) in one of the most far-reaching and important revolutions in teaching theory and practice that any national system of education has ever known. The first step was Rawdon Levett’s famous letter to Nature in 1870, though it was thirty years before any solid progress could be claimed. Another twenty years of steady endeavour, in which some well-known members of this Association took a leading part, was necessary before the first of our major reports (that on Geometry) was published. Yet another twenty years, in which time four more reports were issued, bring us to the greatest change of all: the Jeffery Report and the acceptance by the schools and the Examining Authorities of the Alternative Syllabus. So far as can be judged after ten years’ experience this revolution, far-reaching in its effect on the mathematical work in schools, has been entirely bloodless—for Euclid, if deposed, is neither exiled nor ostracised.