ABSTRACT
While the “New Math” movement was international, the implementation and success or failure of the curriculum reforms in countries around the world was highly idiosyncratic (Kilpatrick, 2023; De Bock, 2023). Previous analyses of the movement in the United States have attributed the difficulties experienced by its reformers to political currents (Philips, 2014), structural and cultural obstacles within U. S. education (e.g., Davis 2003, p. 644–645), and to substantive problems with New Math itself (Kline, 1973). One important aspect of the reform movement that remains underexplored is the public discourse about New Math. In the United States, where curriculum decisions are often made in the political sphere, public debate can have an outsized role in facilitating or undermining a curriculum reform, regardless of the curriculum’s merits. Education scholars may find themselves frustrated about the poor quality of the debate over the curriculum reform (e.g., Fey & Graeber, 2003, p. 523; Payne, 2003, p. 575–576), but for scholars in the field of political science, the idea that people form opinions about critical matters in a low-information environment is hardly new. As explained by one scholar, “the existence of the badly informed voter is now a central part of political science’s intellectual heritage” (Lupia 1994, p. 63). To say that members of the public are ill-informed about issues relating to mathematics curriculum reform is not a pejorative statement, and it should not surprise us. A full understanding of the United States’ New Math movement, however, demands that we consider this public discourse, even though it may be ill-informed. The present study uses letters written to the editors of major American newspapers in the period from 1960 to 1980 to identify and describe themes in the public debate about the curriculum reforms. The study shows that shifts in the public discourse about New Math were largely detached from shifts in facts on the ground and tied to broader cultural changes instead.
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
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Kilpatrick, Jeremy (2023). The new math as an international phenomenon. Revista de História da Educação Matemática, 9, pp. 1–17.
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