A very long time ago, the United States and several other countries set out to completely reform primary mathematics education. Initial planning was already happening in the 1950s, with wide adoption in public grade schools taking place by the 1960s through 1970s. This effort, eventually branded as “The New Math”, met with widespread, often harsh criticism. The famous physicist Richard Feynman criticized it in 1965. A best-selling book “Why Johnny Can’t Add: The Failure of the New Math” was published in 1973. In 1999, Time magazine placed the New Math on their list of the 100 worst ideas of the 20th century.
So why all the backlash? It’s hard to argue with the basic premise of the effort: that comprehension of mathematical ideas, rather than development of rote arithmetic skills, should be the primary goal of the curriculum. This seems even more relevant today. This is an age in which our economy is driven by technology, technology is driven by mathematical ideas, and every student has the equivalent of a 1990s supercomputer in their pocket. If anything, the motivation for the New Math was ahead of its time.
I would argue that the perceived failure was a case of poor execution, rather than fundamentally flawed ideas. Course content was initially created by academic mathematicians, who may not have had a good understanding of practical pedagogy or the realities of the grade school classroom. Elementary teachers were poorly prepared for the dramatic change of direction, and often lacked the mathematical training necessary to fully understand the topics they were teaching. And parents, seeing apparent nonsense in the textbooks and concerned about their children’s future, were often outraged.
As someone who learned “The New Math” as a child, I can honestly say that I’m grateful for the experience. Just like my parents, I memorized the times tables and learned long division. I learned to add and subtract decimal numbers with multiple digits. But those simple skills were built upon (or alongside) logic, basic set theory, and the laws of algebra. I learned to think of whole numbers in terms of cardinality of sets. I learned to do arithmetic in different bases. I learned to think of fractions as parts of a whole, or relative sizes of subsets, not just marks on a page. Most importantly, I learned to explicitly separate concepts from their representations. I’m convinced that introducing this way of thinking at a young age has profound benefits. And I think those benefits are even more relevant today than when they were introduced.
So what happened to the failed “New Math”? From what I understand, it didn’t disappear, it just evolved. Suggestions and demands of parents, teachers, and professional educators were gradually incorporated into the curriculum. Most of the “useless” abstract content has been filtered out. Modular arithmetic was not in my children’s textbooks. It feels to me like we lost something.