Battleground Schools

The fight over how to best teach students math has two camps of thought, conservative and progressive, of which neither camp has a perfect solution. As with most methods they serve different learning styles and we need to have innovative mathematicians to solve the many problems that the future holds for civilization.

The Progressivist Form (1910-1940) is the pre-television, pre-calculator era and the stress for students was just to learn the basic operations and become fluent in them. As society changed and television and other industrial/commercial products flourished the era of New Math developed in the 1960's.

This type of thinking change was not in line with public perception or consumption and eventually was replaced with by the 1990's with National Standards. We have the era of television, calculators, and computers starting to influence all walks of the mathematical life.

A new standard needs to be formed to give way to a society that has grown by a factor of four
and has more highly educated citizens than ever before, that are more literate, more visual and more free thinking than ever before in history. This change in society moves forward driven by technology that is ever improving and is more visual than ever before and now has interactive television, wireless computer networks, and software that performs as sophisticatedly as we think and is moving faster than imagined into interactivity and modelling thoughts so that the level of mathematics for our futures must encourage more interactive free thinking students to move up the mathematical ladder to solve the challenging problems of the future.