Excerpt from Fundamentals of High School Mathematics: A Textbook Designed to Follow Arithmetic The traditional course of study in high school mathematics needs to be completely reconstructed. Five years of intensive investigation have established striking inadequacies in the first-year course: both what we teach and how we teach it. First: more than half of the conventional first-year course will never be used by the vast majority of our pupils. Second: the claims which we make that we are training pupirs "to think intelligently" will be difficult, if not impossible, to substantiate. The very content and organization of the course tends to inhibit this. Most of it provides little or no opportunity for training in "problem-solving." Our courses of study emphasize habit-forination and rote memory, and these courses are almost exactly determined by the textbook. Finally: standardized tests given to more than 100 high schools show clearly that neither in securing formal skill nor in developing powers of analytical thinking is our instruction satisfactory. Striking needs: (1) courses of study based on a clear-cut program; (2) a real psychology of how children learn mathematics, expressed through new types of "wordy" textbooks and manuals of method. Courses must be constructed on principles of social worth and "thinking" outcomes that have been definitely established. Current courses have not been so organized. The slate should be wiped clean and a new course organized on a clear-cut program. No material should be included which cannot be defended either on the basis of social worth, or upon the probability of relatively worth-while thought power. 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.

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