Essays on Mathematical Education (Classic Reprint)

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Excerpt from Essays on Mathematical Education It has always been hard for people to judge with any accuracy the work of their own age, and it is hard for us to do so to-day. In spite of our optimism and of our certainty that we are progressing, what we conceive to be an era of great educational awakening may appear to the historian of the future as one in which noble ideals were sacrificed to the democratizing of the school, and the twentieth century may not rank with the sixteenth when the toll is finally taken. It is, therefore, with some hesitancy that we should assert that we live in a period of remarkable achievement in all that pertains to education. That the period is one of advance is in harmony with the general principle of evolution, but that all that we do is uniformly progressive is not at all in accord with general experience. Certain it is that the present time is one of agitation, of the shattering of idols, and of the setting up of strange gods in their places. Nothing is sacred to the iconoclast, and he is found in the school as he is found in the church, in government, and in the social world. Among the objects of attack in this generation is "the science venerable" that has come down to us from Pythagoras and Euclid, from Mohammed ben Musa and Bhaskara, and from Cardan, Descartes, and Newton. And yet it does not seem to be mathematics itself that is challenged so much as the way in which it has been presented to the youth in our schools, and to most of us the challenge seems justified With all the excellence of Euclid, his work is not for the child, and with all the value of formal algebra, the science needs some other introduction than the arid one until recently accorded to it. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.