I had a moment of revelation reading Toby Young's
pamphlet the other day. I'm sure there are people
queuing up to call it simplistic, but it occurred to me that his
views are especially dangerously so for mathematics.
His unashamedly Gradgrindian
position is that there can be no worthwhile learning of higher
thought processes-argument, analysis, abstraction - that is not
embedded in a substrate of facts. Well, given the howling lack of
knowledge that the press likes to report as existing among the
general populace, I'm not going to argue with that, although
perhaps it was ever thus. (Did Magna Carta die in
vain? and was it of a surfeit
of palfreys?) Young imputes to educators who advocate
'problem-solving' a position which deprecates the mere learning of
facts. He considers this progressive orthodoxy inimical to real
achievement grounded in rote learning, whether of the dates of the
kings and queens of England or of musical scales.
But maths is rather different, because maths is
process. Learning the names of six sorts of quadrilateral is not
mathematics. Learning how to construct arguments in plane geometry,
by contrast, is a training in all sorts of higher cognitive
skills-and it requires very few initial facts (five, famously), and
only a little taxonomy along the way. Indeed, the whole of
mathematical analysis is built on nothing more than elementary
arithmetic plus one statement about sequences and/or bounds.
And so I see a problem emerging. Young's Manichaeism pits
traditionalist fact-grinding against progressive problem-solving.
Yet in mathematics it's the traditionalists who like
problem-solving, by which they mean a mathematics not of taxonomy
but of process, in which exam questions are stated simply and the
test is of the student's ability to think their way through them -
to construct, test and communicate mathematical arguments. By
contrast the progressive orthodoxy of the last 30 years has
produced an exam system of great reliability but very little
validity, in which questions are broken down into small,
predictable parts, promoting a brittle, superficial learning that
breaks down when given an unstructured or unfamiliar task.
This inversion of the traditional and the progressive is not
perfect, of course. One could argue that students still need to
know mathematical formulae-but it is striking that those who have
achieved most in maths usually have very few formulae committed to
memory. Rather they have done the calculations so many times that
they are able to re-derive results without fuss - like being able
to progress quickly through the easy stages of a video game, or a
familiar rock climb, or simpler exercises on the piano. What is
indisputable is that one learns maths by doing maths. So, to take
an example, I've discussed with various mathematicians the value of
learning long division. The common view is that its value lies
not in its utility, but rather in having experienced and
practised the algorithm (which is only really fully understood when
one extends it to the algebraic long division of polynomials).
So to learn mathematics one certainly has to do a great
deal of mathematics, acquiring a set of tools with which one is
familiar - but it is this practice of process, not the memorising
of facts, that is requisite for mastery. But such processes once
acquired are not always very applicable - several of those
mathematicians said that they had to re-learn long division
whenever they wanted to remember what it is. To give algorithmic
process-learning any value, one also has to learn how and why the
tools work, how to apply them in unfamiliar settings, and how to
decide which tool (or combination of tools) to use to solve a
problem. Only thus does one progress.
I do wonder whether politicians and policy-makers, especially
those whose own mathematical studies did not progress beyond age
16, and who perhaps never really felt empowered by the acquisition
of their own mathematical toolkit, really understand that the
traditional/progressive divide does not work the same way in maths.
It would certainly explain some features of the new curriculum.
Dr Niall MacKay is an ACME member and Reader in the
Department of Mathematics, University of
York.