The New Math

A Political History

Christopher J. Phillips

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780226185019
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

An era of sweeping cultural change in America, the postwar years saw the rise of beatniks and hippies, the birth of feminism, and the release of the first video game. It was also the era of new math. Introduced to US schools in the late 1950s and 1960s, the new math was a curricular answer to Cold War fears of American intellectual inadequacy. In the age of Sputnik and increasingly sophisticated technological systems and machines, math class came to be viewed as a crucial component of the education of intelligent, virtuous citizens who would be able to compete on a global scale.In this history, Christopher J. Phillips examines the rise and fall of the new math as a marker of the period's political and social ferment. Neither the new math curriculum designers nor its diverse legions of supporters concentrated on whether the new math would improve students' calculation ability. Rather, they felt the new math would train children to think in the right way, instilling in students a set of mental habits that might better prepare them to be citizens of modern society—a world of complex challenges, rapid technological change, and unforeseeable futures. While Phillips grounds his argument in shifting perceptions of intellectual discipline and the underlying nature of mathematical knowledge, he also touches on long-standing debates over the place and relevance of mathematics in liberal education. And in so doing, he explores the essence of what it means to be an intelligent American—by the numbers.

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

The American Subject

Hooray for new math,

New-hoo-hoo-math,

It won’t do you a bit of good to review math.

It’s so simple,

So very simple,

That only a child can do it!

Satirist Tom Lehrer’s song “New Math” captured for many Americans the absurdity and complexity of midcentury reforms in math classrooms. The tune was included on his 1965 album That Was the Year That Was, the cover of which prominently featured contemporary newspaper headlines. Lehrer’s track listing stands as a record of the era’s cultural history: “Send the Marines,” “Wernher von Braun,” “Vatican Rag.” Lehrer’s “New Math” spoof purported to be a lesson for parents confused by recent changes in their children’s arithmetic textbook, pointing out that success in the new curriculum no longer required getting the answer right, only “understand[ing] what you are doing.” Lehrer informed listeners that some new math problems involved base eight instead of the usual base ten (or decimal) system. Luckily, base eight was “just like base ten really—if you’re missing two fingers.”

“New Math” was both a joke and a comment on the products of a controversial curriculum project, partially sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and involving hundreds of mathematicians, teachers, education professors, and administrators. Deemphasizing rote calculation while infamously introducing sets and other new concepts, the designers of the new math attempted to fundamentally reform the way Americans thought about mathematics. The curriculum rose and fell swiftly: initially introduced into schools between 1958 and 1962, the new math’s influence peaked in the 1965 school year and was widely condemned a decade later. Newspapers, television shows, and comic strips all took notice of the reforms. Parents pored through algebra and arithmetic textbooks for the first time in years, and taxpayers hotly debated the multi-million-dollar reforms that they had, indirectly, paid for. Lehrer, himself a onetime teacher of mathematics, accurately included the new math among the major events of midcentury America.

There was, however, no such stable and coherent thing as the new math. The label loosely refers to a collection of curriculum projects, throughout the 1950s and 1960s, whose approaches—and resulting textbooks—diverged substantially, both mathematically and pedagogically. The phrase “new math” emerged around 1960 as shorthand for these “new mathematics curricula.” A range of awkward acronyms for math reform groups—from UICSM and MINNEMAST to GCMP and SMSG—appeared in this period, and one perhaps overly optimistic estimate suggested that by 1965 at least half the nation’s students were using new math textbooks.¹ At a minimum, millions of new books entered midcentury math classrooms.

Nearly all the reformers were driven by a sense that the way math had been taught for decades was no longer working. In an age of increasingly sophisticated mathematical models and technological systems—and just after the mathematical sciences had contributed so spectacularly to the allied victory in the Second World War—the idea of math as a set of facts and esoteric techniques appeared outmoded. Moreover, reformers believed math class provided intellectual training. Existing textbooks were not factually incorrect or ineffective per se but were cultivating the “wrong” mental habits in students. Teaching mathematics as rote memorization of multiplication tables meant teaching students the wrong way to think about mathematics and, more importantly, the wrong way to reason in general.

One reform program was by far the most influential in the period: the School Mathematics Study Group (SMSG). As the primary recipient of federal funding and as an initiative founded by joint action of the professional organizations of mathematicians and mathematics teachers, SMSG effectively created the “official” version of new math. Led by mathematician Edward Begle, the group worked from 1958 to 1972 to produce textbooks, monographs, teacher training guides, and a variety of other educational materials. With the imprimatur of the federal government and of professional mathematicians, Begle was ever mindful of the need to avoid appearing as if SMSG were imposing a curriculum on schools. As a result, SMSG produced only temporary and disposable materials, ones that were intended to model reforms for teachers and publishers without directly challenging the sale of commercial textbooks. Given the size and complexity of the student population studying mathematics at any one time, SMSG’s leaders thought that it would be better to influence publishers with exemplary books than to create competing textbooks.² The actual effect of SMSG was nevertheless substantial, both in the extent to which its own books were used and in the direct influence its participants had on the construction of commercial textbooks.

Although originally funded to work on textbooks for the “college capable” students in secondary schools, SMSG gradually expanded its operation, producing textbooks for every grade and type of student, including material for elementary schools, “culturally disadvantaged”—mainly inner-city—children, and “slow” students. SMSG alone published nearly four million copies of over twenty-six different textbooks, in addition to teachers’ manuals and monographs.³ By the late 1960s, SMSG was the dominant organization in mathematics curriculum design, serving as a clearinghouse for various curricular reforms and education initiatives, as well as providing the infrastructure by which new mathematics curricula were tested.

SMSG’s initial goal of reaching the talented students who had failed to be attracted to the field was a concern of great importance in an era when scientific innovation and military success were understood to go hand-in-hand. SMSG’s leaders never thought, however, that their efforts would substantially increase the number of American mathematicians. As Begle explained, “The number of high school students, even if we consider only the better twenty-five percent, who go on to become research mathematicians is so infinitesimal that we spend almost no time worrying about them.” Rather, “we must give as many students as possible a solid foundation in mathematics so that they will not be handicapped in later years, no matter what occupation they choose.”⁴ Given that “no one can predict what mathematical skills will be important and useful in the future,” Begle wanted SMSG to ensure that all students possessed “an understanding of the role of mathematics in our society” because it was essential for “intelligent citizenship.”⁵

The idea that math should be taught as a central component of intelligent citizenship was integral to the rise and fall of the new math. Many of the new textbooks, regardless of whether they emerged directly from SMSG or from one of the other new math groups, promoted mathematics’ role in liberal education. The new math’s development and deployment were based upon claims about the special nature of “modern” mathematical knowledge, the relationship between this nature and the mental habits resulting from its study, and the importance of these particular habits for the shaping of U.S. citizens. Math class was said to provide epistemological training—teaching students about what counts as valid knowledge and the grounds for its validity. In turn, the new math was rejected in the 1970s primarily because the arguments put forth in the late 1950s and 1960s about the ability of “modern” mathematics to promote intellectual discipline ceased to be compelling. The backlash certainly didn’t entail rejection of the idea that learning mathematics counted as learning to think. Critics of the new math simply put forward rival arguments about the relationship between mathematical knowledge and intellectual habits. Supporters and critics of the new math had different conceptions of the merits and qualities of particular ways of thinking, that is, different conceptions of the mental discipline virtuous citizens should possess.

* * *

This book is a political history of the new math, one that grounds and interrogates midcentury American history through the changing mathematics curriculum.⁶ It is a political history, but not because it is mainly concerned with connecting the curriculum to specific political platforms. Rather, proponents and opponents of the new math believed the curriculum could order and shape the mind, the family, the society, and the state. The reform of the mathematics curriculum was never limited to discussions about which topics to cover; the curriculum always entailed an argument about the proper relationship between the content and purpose of education. Mathematicians at midcentury did not agree about the nature of their subject, and Americans certainly disagreed about the mental habits math class ought to promote. Furthermore, the intellectual claims made about the curriculum and the role of the schools changed dramatically between 1955 and 1975. As a result, Americans evaluated the math curriculum differently. The new math embedded, instantiated, and made visible the changing politics of midcentury America.

Questions of why the curriculum succeeded or failed are important and have engaged subsequent curriculum designers and critics. The focus of The New Math is instead on grounding the perception of success and failure in changing evaluations of the nature of mathematical knowledge, and of the relevance of particular habits of thought for the cultivation of virtuous citizens. This approach calls into question one typical story of the new math’s demise: that its supporters failed to deliver on the promise of improving computation skills. Neither the curriculum’s designers nor its supporters ever focused on whether the new math would improve calculation ability. They talked instead about needing to prepare citizens for modern society, for a world of complex challenges, seemingly rapid technological changes, and unforeseeable future conflicts. Critics’ gestures toward declining computation ability not only relied upon flimsy evidence but also overlooked the fact that the curriculum was never intended to improve the percentage of students who knew multiplication tables by heart. What had changed was a complicated set of political commitments, concerning the value of mechanistic intellectual habits, the relative importance of elite forms of knowledge compared to local and traditional ones, and the role of mathematics as mental discipline—that is, commitments concerning the way learning mathematics counted as learning to think.

A Discipline That Disciplines

Many fields of knowledge are useful, conveying practical information or manipulative skills. Mathematics is among these subjects, providing a collection of techniques used widely to measure and model the world. Its methods, nomenclature, and authority are claimed by a wide assortment of expert practices, from wine assessment and election polling to meteorology. Math provides the language for the quantification of certainty and the concepts that give structure to scientific descriptions of the universe. Yet, math is also abstract, celebrated for its insularity from the mundane and messy facts of the physical world. It is in this sense a chameleon of a discipline. It is obvious and evident—what else could 2 + 2 be but 4?—as well as abstract and obtuse—what could it possibly mean to claim that e^iπ = −1? Mastery requires years of study within esoteric domains, but most baseball fans are familiar with how to calculate a batting average. Mathematical practices are ubiquitous and obscure, quotidian and esoteric.

If many fields are useful, only a very few subjects are said to be good for the mind, preparing the student to think well in dealing with a wide variety of life’s intellectual, social, moral, and political predicaments. Among these subjects, mathematics has long enjoyed a special place. Math class is meant to convey information about triangles, numbers, and equations, but also to provide mental exercise; it has never been just about learning facts. Math is a discipline which disciplines.

Math has, after all, been associated with pure reason and reliable knowledge at least since Greek antiquity. The term mathematics had a much more expansive meaning in its original Greek context, referring to general disciplines or subjects of study. For centuries, mathematics and the related term mathesis encompassed both elite practices of deductive or symbolic reckoning and the useful skills of surveying, celestial navigation, astrology, and harmonics.⁷ Even as its methods, objects, and uses have changed, mathematics has remained a collection of practical techniques known by many as well as a compilation of esoteric results understood by only a few.

Ancient Greek geometry was the most successful practice holding a special claim on reasoning. Deductive geometry, as historian Reviel Netz has suggested, with its diagrams, highly specific language, and strict conventions, was effectively an “idealized, written version of oral argument.” Netz’s The Shaping of Deduction in Greek Mathematics concludes that mathematicians were likely “eccentrics” in a “world of doctors, sophists, and rhetoricians”—but eccentrics who established stable practices for making formal rhetorical arguments.⁸ Greek geometry was a practice impossible to situate historically without an understanding of the contemporary intellectual and material tools of persuasive reasoning.

Take, for example, one of the most well-known ancient instances of math standing proxy for reasoning. In Plato’s Meno, Socrates shows his interlocutor how even an uneducated slave “already knows” how to construct a square that has double the area of a given square. He leads the slave to build the square using the diagonal of the original square, then continues:

SOCRATES: Has he answered with any opinions that were not his own? Meno: No, they were all his.

SOCRATES: Yet he did not know, as we agreed a few minutes ago.

MENO: True.

SOCRATES: But these opinions were somewhere in him, were they not?

MENO: Yes.

SOCRATES: So a man who does not know has in himself true opinions on a subject without having knowledge.

MENO: It would appear so.

SOCRATES: At present these opinions, being newly aroused, have a dreamlike quality. But if the same questions are put to him on many occasions and in different ways, you can see that in the end he will have a knowledge on the subject as accurate as anybody’s.

MENO: Probably.

SOCRATES: This knowledge will not come from teaching but from questioning. He will recover it for himself.⁹

Geometry was not the subject of particular facts so much as the exemplar of intuition.

In the early modern period, as in antiquity, math was still tied to intellectual and philosophical practices, even if very few individuals ever learned more than simple arithmetic. Historian Matthew Jones has shown how René Descartes, Blaise Pascal, and Gottfried Leibniz all conceived mathematics as a way of cultivating the self. Mathematical techniques improved the ability of humans to reason and examine evidence, they claimed. Near contemporaries opposed extensive training in or reliance on mathematics with precisely the opposite reasoning—math, they suggested, was unsuited for scientific inquiry or individual development.¹⁰ Mathematics’ contingent relationship to intellectual training grounded the arguments for and against its use.

The association between math and reasoning was not exclusively dependent upon the special nature of geometric knowledge. Probability, algebra, and analysis were all developed in part on the presumption that the results of mathematical demonstrations and h...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• 1. Introduction: The American Subject
• 2. The Subject and the State: The Origins of the New Math
• 3. The Textbook Subject: Mathematicians and the New Math
• 4. The Subject in Itself: Arithmetic as Knowledge
• 5. The Subject in the Classroom: The Selling of the New Math
• 6. The Basic Subject: New Math and Its Discontents
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index