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Freudenthal (1981) PDF
Freudenthal (1981) PDF
Forgive me, it was not me whose chose the theme, though when it was first
suggested to me, I experienced it as a challenge. A challenge, indeed, but to be
sure not as one to emulate Hilbert, who at the Paris International Congress
of Mathematicians in 1900 pronounced his celebrated 23 mathematical
problems, which were to profoundly influence, nay presage, the course of
mathematics for almost a century. If it were not modesty that prevents me
from even trying it, it should be the obvious fact that
9 problems,
9 problem solving,
9 problem solvers
mean different things in mathematics education from what they mean in
mathematics.
But first let us look at the other noun in the title: education. It can mean
roughly three things:
9 the educational process taking place in the family, at school, on the
street, and everywhere,
9 an administrative establishment,
9 a theoretical activity, called educational research.
The major problems I am going to summarise, are o f t h e f i r s t kind, partly related
to the second, while I will disregard the third kind. What I am interested in is
problems in mathematics education as a social activity rather than problems as an
entrance to educational research. However, at the end I will cast a glance at
educational research as one of the major problems of mathematics education.
Yet let me come back to what I announced as a difference between problems,
problem solving, and problem solvers in mathematics on the one hand and
mathematics education on the other.
Mathematical problems are problems within a science arising for a large
part from this science itself or from other sciences. Education problems are
problems of life arising from changing needs, moods and whims of a changing
society. Hilbert's problems have been seminal for a century. The address I
deliver today may be forgotten never to be remembered ten years from now.
From olden times mathematicians have posed problems for each other,
both major and minor ones: here is the problem, solve it; if you can, tell me;
Allow me to start with the most earthly problem I can think of. Among the
major ones it is the most urgent. What is even a problem is how to formulate
it correctly and unmistakably. Let us try a preformulation. It runs:
As a matter of fact both are wrong. My problem is not John Roe and
Mary Doe. It is a problem, indeed, why many children do not learn arithmetic
as they should, and it is a major one because more than anything else, failure
in arithmetic may mean failure at school and in life. My concern, however,
is not, or not primarily, what is wrong in classrooms and textbooks- today
- that creates a host of underachievers.
Let me change the question. I now ask:
9 Why can Jennifer not do arithmetic?
Rather than an abstraction like John and Mary, Jennifer is a living child
(though I have changed her name) whom I can describe in all detail. The two
details that matter here, are that she was eight years old and could not do
arithmetic. Meanwhile the question
Let me add two examples, two paradigmatic cases though not enough for
theory building.
To test underachievers it is useful to ask them what is 2 + 9. Rather than
at the result look at how the task is performed. Is it done by counting nine
forward from 2, that is: 3, 4 . . . . ? Whether you call it a diagnosis or not, if it
happens this way, you can be sure about at least two sources of failure: no
awareness of commutativity nor of the use of the positional system.
Another example: a twelve years old girl whom I taught understanding
fractions simplified 16124 to 3/8 - an unexpected failure. She explained it by
16 = 2 • 8, 24 = 3 • 8, thus 3/8. When I dug more deeply, the source appeared
to be a failure of short term memory, that is, an error in storing or retrieving
intermediate results.
This experience led me to better understand her failures and those of other
children which in the past I had wrongly interpreted, for instance attributed
to a lack of concentration. I started remedial work to improve short term
memory, which proved successful, even in transfer: factorising mentally whole
numbers below 100 with at least three prime factors. This exercise draws
heavily on short memory, indeed. Say 48 = 6 x 8, 6 = 2 x 3, 8 = 2 x 4, and
now you can imagine what happens, the badly stored 2 x 3 cannot be retrieved.
A fortnight after this exercise the girl performed the same task with no
difficulty at all, and short term memory, in general, had greatly improved.
3
In the preceding I stressed
observing learning processes
against
testing learning products.
Amongst the learners I mentioned I forgot one, the biggest one. Mankind too
is a learner. Observing its learning process is what w.e call history. How can the
individual learner profit from knowledge about the big learning process of
mankind? Rather than from its detail he can profit from the fact as such. Each
stage in the growth of mathematics meant:
9 knowledge acquired by insight
transformed by
9 schematising and memorising (or call it, codifying)
into
9 skills and insight of a higher order.
Let me explain by a few examples what I mean by schematising. A problem
of long standing:
I am sure you will solve it by insight. But as early as Babylonian antiquity one
knew the schematism of a pair of linear equations with two unknowns to solve
this kind of problem, and in more recent times this schematic insight has been
anew schematised by the rule: Put the unknown numbers x andy, write down
the connecting algebraic relations, and solve them by algebra. The most
modern schematisation of this idea is vector space.
Clumsy algebra by insight was schematised by Vieta and Descartes' formal
methods, and this process of schematising still continues in modern algebra.
Calculation of areas, volumes, gravity centres, and moments, which once
required the genius of an Archimedes - and even harder problems - are today
within the grasp of our freshmen, thanks to Newton and Leibniz' schematising
infinitesimal methods in what is known as Calculus.
But let us explain it in an even more elementary way. As early as written
sources can remember, counting was schematised by introducing higher
level units such as 5, 10, 100, 1000, and as early as reckoning was invented,
it was schematised by a positional idea: higher level units materialised by
counters on the abacus. Schematising arithmetic proceeded one step further by
transforming
and
~1 fig
Fig. 1
z 7 6 2 76
Fig. 2
I 3/2 I /02 2. 02
Fig. 3
Ill
Fig. 4
[lll~
Fig. 5
the last step before the final schematisation of the usual column addition.
140 HANSFREUDENTHAL
taught from the viewpoint of insight and more has been learned by insight than
we are aware of. All agree and textbook writers witness that elementary
arithmetic cannot be learned in any other way than by insight whether it is
taught that way or not. But it is also true that as things go on, as teaching
proceeds to higher grades, to column addition and multiplication, to long
division, to fractions - ordinary and decimal - to algebra, to learning math-
ematical language, the part played by insight changes. Not just by diminishing,
but its character changes. There is a tendency that the learner's insight is
superseded by the teacher's, the textbook writer's, and finally by that of the
adult mathematician. And the same holds on the long winding road, starting
with concretely understood word problems and leading to highly formalised
and badly understood applied mathematics.
This is why people who advocate learning by insight, disagree about what
is insight. The wrong perspective of the so-called New Math was that of replac-
ing the learner's by the adult mathematician's insight.
Yet this is not my main point. I have still to explain why we are not aware
of how much is nevertheless being learned by insight. It is a most natural
thing that once an idea has been learned, the learner forgets about his learning
process, once a goal has been reached, the trail is blotted out. Skills acquired
by insight are exercised and perfected by - intentional and unintentional
- training. This is a good thing. What is bad, is
9 sources of insight clogged by acquired routines, never to be reopened,
and this is what usually happens. It explains why teachers at higher grades
so often complain about teaching habits at lower grades. If it is restricted to
the first acquisition of some idea, learning by insight does not deserve this
name. What is crucial, is
9 retention of insight,
which is gravely endangered by
9 premature training,
9 too much training,
9 training as such.
This then is my fourth major problem in mathematics education:
9 How to keep open the sources of insight during the training process,
9 how to stimulate retention of insight, in particular in the process of
schematising?
Let us consider one feature of progressive schematising that I did not yet
consider; I mean that in such a progression not all learners progress at the same
pace and reach the same goals. Progressive schematising is a way to account
for natural differences in aptitudes and abilities. Differentiation is a general
problem of education. In spite of the wide variability of linguistic mastery, it
is a fact that people can communicate with each other in their mother tongue
on a broad scale of subjects. Why is mathematics different, and should it really
be different?
There are reasons - social reasons - why in spite of their diverging learning
abilities learners should learn together as they are expected to work together
in the society. Cooperation involves levels of work. Cooperative learning
presupposes levels of learning. It is a fact that mathematics lends itself, as
no other subject does, to distinguishing levels, in mathematics and in learning
mathematics.
144 HANS F R E U D E N T H A L
Perhaps you will complain that up to now I have paid almost no attention to
subject matter and its didactics. If by subject matter you mean some chapter
of a textbook, you will be disappointed. These are no major problems. But
I agree that teaching is always teaching something. Something rather than
anything. Something worth being taught. But what is worth being taught?
In order to be taught it should be applicable, in some sense, in any sense,
in any sense whatever. What does this mean? Teaching as much mathematics
as the science teachers pretend they need? Or after a block of compulsory
algebra and calculus a few choice subjects like probability, numerical methods,
linear programming, or mechanics?
Everybody knows that it does not work. From an educational point of view,
application is a wrong perspective cherished by old math and even more by
New Math. The right perspective is primarily from environment towards
mathematics rather than the other way round. Not: first mathematics and then
back to the real world but first the real world and then mathematising.
The real world - what does it mean? Forgive this careless expression. In
teaching mathematising 'the real world' is represented by a meaningful context
involving a mathematical problem. 'Meaningful' of course means: meaningful
to the learners. Mathematics should be taught within contexts, and I would like
the most abstract mathematics taught within the most concrete context.
Let me tell a little story about what context can mean, not only for learning
mathematising but even for learning mathematical skills. In a context of
sharing and leasing gardens, fourth graders had to figure out, among other
things, the rent of a plot like
Fig. 6
MAJOR PROBLEMS OF MATHEMATICS EDUCATION 145
where each square pays five florins. All children who stayed within the context
of squares of land and of florins to be paid got the correct answer of 2289
florins, whereas all the others who prematurely divorced the problem from
its context and schematised it as the numerical multiplication problem 489 x 5
got the wrong solution 2089
What is this little story to suggest? That in the learning process mathema-
tising a situation deserves priority over solving word problems by schematisms.
After this interruption let me formulate my eighth major problem of
mathematics education:
9 How to create suitable contexts in order to teach mathematising?
10
11
12
Where can you find the nerve-fibres to influence education? I will choose two
extremes, the most conservative and the most progressive medium, the most
powerful determinant of present and the most powerful of future education,
that is
148 HANS F R E U D E N T H A L
9 textbooks, and
9 teacher training.
Let us start with textbooks. Teachers, most often, heavily depend on text-
books. I do not blame them for this lack of self-reliance. After three or four
years of inadequate training, textbooks might be their last, their only resource.
You have been confronted here with ten problems of mathematics edu-
cation that I thought of as major ones, and with the eleventh, of how to solve
them. But from the start onwards I have warned you that problem soMng in
education is not a job for theoreticians but for the participants in the edu-
cational process. Textbook authors are participants, who in turn depend on
the presumptive users of their production. Should I ask textbook authors to
solve my problems? Of course not, even not to try it. The least and the most
I can expect them to do is to ponder my problems. Perhaps they already did
- indeed it was not me who invented my problems. If they did, and if in some
respect they succeeded, let it be known, not by guidelines and teacher manuals,
which are often belied by the textbook, but by the textbook itself, by its
built-in features. For instance, progressively schematised subject matter would
be a good case, provided it is leading the teacher and learner, not along firmly
preprogrammed paths but along reflection and retention of insight. Math-
ematising the environment is a hard thing to be taught by textbooks but just
for this reason worth being tried. And so I could comment on quite a few
among my problems.
I now turn to teacher training. Should I duplicate what I said about text-
books and ask teacher trainers as participants in the educational process to
contribute to solving my major problems? Yes, I will, but that is not enough.
Teacher Students learning mathematics are expected to learn it as a didactical
feature. In teacher training each of my major problems of mathematics edu-
cation has its didactical counterpart, from
Things are even more involved. Teacher students, in general, belong to the
large group of adults where the sources of what they once learned by insight,
have been clogged by the knowledge and skills they acquired meanwhile. To
MAJOR PROBLEMS OF MATHEMATICS EDUCATION 149
say it more concretely: they care neither about why multiplication by 100 is
carried out by 'adding two zeros' nor about the fact that you can or why you
should argue such a piece of knowledge. So they have to undergo remediation:
relearning such facts while teaching children and observing their learning
processes. The higher the level of learning, the more paradoxical this con-
clusion may sound. Knowing a piece of mathematics too well may be a serious.
impediment to teaching it decently as long as the teacher is unconscious about
the learning process that produced his excellence.
So he needs relearning by observing learning processes of less skilled people,
of children. But now we are faced with one of the big problems in teacher
training. Whereas in the school environment one can easily arrange for observ-
ing short term learning processes, it is impractible and hence impossible to do
the like for long term learning processes. Thought experiments, such as under-
taken by textbook authors, cannot f'dl this gap if undertaken by unskilled
people. Lack of experience in long term learning processes is the proper cause
of the teacher student's future dependence on textbooks as their only sources
for long term learning processes. How to solve this dilemma is a problem worth
studying. Let me restrict myself to this one. Teacher training as a whole should
be rethought and reshaped.
13
NOTE