Stop Teaching Calculating; Start Teaching Math
Conrad Wolfram:
I wanted to talk today about math education and then specifically reforming math education in a rather dramatic fashion, so if you've got eggs to throw, this is the time to prepare them!
I think we've got a real problem with math education, particularly in schools right now. Basically, no one's very happy. Most of those trying to learn it think it's boring and irrelevant. Employers think that people don't know enough.
Governments realize it's critical for economic development, but don't know what to do about fixing it, and many teachers are frustrated, too. And yet, without question, math is more important to the world than it ever has been in human history. So at one end we've got falling interest in education in math and at the other, a world that's ever more quantitative, ever more mathematical than it has been. So what's gone wrong and how do we bridge this chasm? Well, actually I think the answer's really very simple: use computers. I want to talk through and explain why I think computers really are the silver bullet to making math education work but used dramatically.
To understand what I'm talking about, let's remind ourselves what math looks like in the real world. It's got lots of modeling, lots of simulation. It's not just for mathematicians, but for a huge range of other subjects: medical imaging, electrical engineering, etc. That's an important thing to understand, of course. And it's actually very popular. Now, look at math in much of education. It looks very different--lots of calculating, usually by hand or sometimes with a calculator and dumbed down problems.
Why teach math?
So to understand why this is, why these things have got so separated, why a chasm has opened up, let's first ask the question, why do we teach math? What is math? What do we mean by it? Well, I think there are sort of three reasons why we teach people math, in particular, why we teach it to everyone. Firstly there's technical jobs. Secondly what I call everyday living. Just being able to survive in a civilized society and prosper in it nowadays requires much more mathematical understanding than it ever did. And thirdly, what one might call logical mind training--being able to reason, whether with math itself or with other things. Math has given society a tremendous ability to go through logical reason.
Posted by Jim Zellmer at August 14, 2012 5:04 AM
Subscribe to this site via RSS/Atom: 
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Conrad Wolfram is a real mathematician and I would expect, though I don't know this, that real mathematicians would agree with my assessment.
But as a real mathematician, having mastered this topic in ways that only real mathematicians do and can, he no longer knows what he knows. Like any real mathematician, he has mastered profoundly concepts and organizations of concepts that are quite beyond the rest of us to fathom. In addition, it may not only be a simple matter of knowing the "basics" of math, but something more fundamental and mysterious as to mind of some mathematicians that seem to be much more than the acquisition of knowledge over time. But, let's forget becoming a mathematician and instead address just becoming facile.
Wolfram's view as presented in his TED talk is, I think, profoundly wrong. One cannot become facile in mathematics without doing by hand, any more than one can play the piano without actually playing.
