As Math Scores Lag, a New Push for the Basics

[Voegelin]

New York Times
By TAMAR LEWIN
November 14, 2006

. . . The changes are being driven by students’ lagging performance on international tests and mathematicians’ warnings that more than a decade of so-called reform math — critics call it fuzzy math — has crippled students . . .

Shalimar Backman, who put pressure on officials here by starting a parents group called Where’s the Math?, remembers the moment she became concerned.

“When my oldest child, an A-plus stellar student, was in sixth grade, I realized he had no idea, no idea at all, how to do long division,” Ms. Backman said, “so I went to school and talked to the teacher, who said, ‘We don’t teach long division; it stifles their creativity.’ ” . . .

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/14/e...&en=4d5105588ec13d17&ei=5094&partner=homepage

 

[billwald]

People been arguing about "basics" since Dewey. The miracle of the computer age is that most working class people need much less math. Either the computer does all the math or the person has access to a calculator.

The people who want their kids to be "movers and shakers" send their kids to private schools or home teach.

 

[Voegelin]

People been arguing about "basics" since Dewey.

Dewey. Well, he did oppose Stalin's show trials. I'll give him credit for that. Not that the people he was defending--Zinovev,Trotsky Radek-- would have been any better had they been able to do in 1936 what they had done between 1918 and 1923.

Ever read Dewey's Impressions of Soviet Russia?

This tract, which Dewey--the father of 20th century public education-- wrote after a tour with other American "educators" of early Stalinist Russia is one of the best arguments for homeschooling ever.

Alice Withrow Field's Protection of Women and Children in Soviet Russia is another.

No...I'm not saying we are going there. Or that our system is directly comparable. America isn't about to do any of that stuff. Not now and not in the future. But there is a similiar mindset. Those writings do show the authoritarian ideology, the social engineering, which is right under the surface when it isn't bubbling to the top, of our current system.

 

[billwald]

I predict continued shrinking of the middle class back to pre-WW2 conditions with a 80% poor/working class, 15% middle class, and 5% rich.

But the nature of poverty has changed and the poor will be pacified with the secret ballot, cheap beer, and sports.