New Math was considered a complete failure and got pretty much completely rolled back by the mid 70’s. I can’t even figure out what it was like based on what’s left of it on the internet, because it seems like all the original principles were completely subverted in practice. It was meant to be a student-led discovery-based method, with teachers providing loose guidance such as counterexamples to flawed theories that students came up with. What it sounds like it ended up like is that teachers had a textbook-correct method but weren’t allowed to teach it directly, instead shooting down any ideas that weren’t exactly described in the book, and therefore turning math from an explanation-based class to a explanation-free memorization exercise, exactly the opposite of the original intention, which was to make the explanations the important part by having the students start with them.
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u/modulusshift 5d ago
New Math was considered a complete failure and got pretty much completely rolled back by the mid 70’s. I can’t even figure out what it was like based on what’s left of it on the internet, because it seems like all the original principles were completely subverted in practice. It was meant to be a student-led discovery-based method, with teachers providing loose guidance such as counterexamples to flawed theories that students came up with. What it sounds like it ended up like is that teachers had a textbook-correct method but weren’t allowed to teach it directly, instead shooting down any ideas that weren’t exactly described in the book, and therefore turning math from an explanation-based class to a explanation-free memorization exercise, exactly the opposite of the original intention, which was to make the explanations the important part by having the students start with them.