Jay Warner wrote: > 4) I agree, & can add my own horror stories, of the sorry state > of education in math. My own opinion, IMHO, is that neither the > curriculum developers and/or those delivering said curriculum > understand what 'math' constitutes. If not this broad > then I submit these good folks don't understand how to communicate > 'math.' As a non-math major & professional, I have to rely upon > Devlin's description (The Math Gene), which is consistent with my > observations of weak students in a local Child Care center & my > business stats students.
Let us make a simple model of society. We start with a group of people who don't understand mathematics, let's call them the A group. The other group of people who understand mathematics is the B group. The A group has no benefit from fancy mathematics, and wants to throw it out of curricula, or at least trivialize it to useful bookkeeping. The A group, disliking mathematics, after high school goes into liberal arts studies, doesn't find a good job outside education. Therefore, education is having a greater influx of the A group, which educates the children to be good A group members: it reproduces by teaching. The A group, being not terribly busy, produces more children, so it reproduces its genes. Only by random, some of the children might be inspired to join B obtaining role models, or by accident accumulate enough genes to afford them the capacity to be a B. On the other hand, the B group has pretty good success in business, industry, research, and so on. None of the B group is really considering the possibility of going to teach in secondary education, not even to mention primary education. Therefore, there isn't anyone who would inspire the children to join the B ranks. Furthermore, the B group is in high demand in business, is often under stress, so the B group produces fewer children who would inherit the genes that might bias a person towards B. B is so busy working that no glitzy advertising is made that would afford B members enjoy distinct prestige in society. Is the B group going to survive if subjected to evolution? I hope you enjoyed this purely hypothetical caricature. -- mag. Aleks Jakulin http://www.ailab.si/aleks/ Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Faculty of Computer and Information Science, University of Ljubljana. . . ================================================================= Instructions for joining and leaving this list, remarks about the problem of INAPPROPRIATE MESSAGES, and archives are available at: . http://jse.stat.ncsu.edu/ . =================================================================
