Mathematics Education’s Slow and Stubborn Road To Obsolescence
Traditional math education’s priorities are chiefly governed by money and bureaucracy.
In 2025, standardized is still alive. A disconnected curriculum that sits in its own echo chamber devoid of history is still what goes on blackboards and whiteboards around the world.
Here is an excerpt from my daughter’s essay(Raya is 16) about her experience with mathematics. And this makes a difference — she is really good at high school math.
She just hates it. Or, in her words, “I don’t smile anymore doing it”.
Mathematics education was never about prioritizing students — or teachers for that matter — first.
It was about reproducing curriculum at scale to sell generally average textbooks, average resources, and for this generation, average ed tech supplements.
It has never been about ensuring kids smile through their experience with mathematics. It’s been about inert numbers and grades to be crunched and cited to promote more benign and costly intervention/ideas.
As I have said in countless blogs, the most costly has been Building Thinking Classrooms, which is coming dangerously close to becoming some default branding of what mathematics looks like in a classroom.
Here are a list of things that are rarely/never addressed in mathematics education and in classrooms.
Mathematics history
Number theory, graph theory, and game theory
Fractals
Recreational mathematics from Martin Gardner
Curiosity, creativity, awe, and wonder
Actual mathematics that promotes positive mental health and identity(see math history)
The negative impact of school mathematics on students — and no, “math therapy” coming from school is not the solution.
The other day, I showed Raya this problem. We sat at the dining room table. We discussed it — especially how a unique value of “a” will create a roller coaster between the two parabolas. Her commentary after we finished was eye-opening. She said it wasn’t that “hard” — you just have to know which tools to use that you have learned in high school.
When I first started going to math conferences, not only would we get stacks of cool problems and puzzles, but we would do them during lunch/our breaks at the conferences — together.
Nowadays, the mathematics has been replaced by selfies. Mathematics has become secondary to the conversation — even if it is in the conversation. Everyone seems to be talking about math, but in reality, it’s talking around math.
The intersection of doing mathematics and conferences is fading into obscurity. As such, mathematics education will become obsolete as a driving force to promote rich mathematics for everyone.
It’s current state is simply to promote rich edu-celebrities.
The end can’t come soon enough…
