The
Cure
(To End the War on Children)
Mathematics
teaching has inescapable moral, social, and political effects. Depending
on the method of education used, it will either preserve the stratification
of society in mutually inimical classes, or it can promote a kinder
society, whose young people have learnt to work and to think together
with common goals, to share a common morality and language, and to accept
each others' differences with patience and respect.
The method selects the outcome. When mathematics
is taught by instruction, its success being measured by testing individuals
privately, the outcome will be a small number who may also learn to
understand its logic; a larger number who find that obedience is rewarded
without this understanding; and the rest who can neither understand,
obey, nor reproduce results, well enough to continue. The moral effect
is to persuade the first group that their ability is of the highest
order; the second that obedience without understanding is almost equally
valued; and those whom the system systematically humiliates and terrorises
- and who it now discards. The social consequences of this destruction
of innocence, dignity, and care for others, are all around us.
The alternative is to understand knowledge as
a network of associations built up over time in every individual mind
through critical discussion of ideas. The source of these ideas is not
the teacher. It is the text-book, which the pupils take home. Everything
the pupils need to know is read by them one after the other, line by
line, out of their own textbook, always aloud. "And what do you
think that means?" the teacher asks of every line; and every answer
offered must be in a pupil's own words. Unpredictably, but repeatedly,
real mental effort is required of everyone. In this way the meaning
of the text is discussed and defined by the class together and is never
monopolised by the most forward pupils. Everyone has their chance. When
their common understanding finally satisfies them - and their teacher
- they then choose the exercises to test themselves; do them, and mark
them or correct them.
Working together like this, patiently connecting
their ideas, children will learn intellectual independence, but also
to enjoy the effort of co-operation, to be patient with each other,
to be respectful of the difficulty of formulating and of combining their
understanding. There is too, I think, a glimpse here of a cure for the
spiritual sickness I mentioned earlier*
for, although spiritual reality has been long a matter of indifference
to science, it is just sharing understanding - which is what science
is itself.
But that is another story.
* See www.gardenofdemocracy.org/sweden.html
Colin
Hannaford,
Oxford, 25th September 2004
