New Math
Under the name New Mathematics of school mathematics education was reformed in the 1960s and 1970s in many countries. Instead of the traditional teaching arithmetic mathematics should be taught as a preoccupation with abstract structures.
The New Mathematics was an international movement that ran in the United States under the name of New Math. With their development was followed, which had begun in the academic mathematics in the decades around 1900 with the set-theoretically - axiomatic formulation of the fundamentals of the subject, and was worn in the 1950s, notably by the group " Nicolas Bourbaki " in academic instruction - which especially Jean Dieudonné entered for the transfer into the school curriculum. In 1959 he gave at an international conference of the OEEC (the predecessor of the OECD) in Royaumont Abbey, the slogan of "Down with Euclid - Death to triangles " First there were debates to forward to the International Congress of Mathematicians in 1958 in Edinburgh. One of the motives was the Sputnik shock, as a result it makes a big educational catch-up in the West.
Even before the OECD conference, there was a corresponding movement in the United States, where the movement was supported among others by the influential Chicago mathematician Marshall Stone and of the School Mathematics Study Group ( SMSG ), headed by Edward G. compani ( Yale, later Stanford ) was advanced, which was funded by the National Science Foundation ( NSF). Again, New Math was included in the curricula of schools. However, it also stimulated resistance, such as Morris Kline add it for example in 1973 in his book Why Johnny can not. The failure of the New Math formulated. In France, in the early 1970s suggested increasing resistance.
In West Germany the "new math " was one of several reforms aimed at responding to those on the proclaimed by Georg Picht " educational emergency "; fall into the same time, among other things, the introduction of the Reformed high school and the establishment of new universities such as reform in Bielefeld and Konstanz. On the Standing Conference of 3 October 1968, the widespread introduction of new mathematics for all school forms from the school year 1972/73 was approved. Walter Robert Fuchs brought it back then with books such as parents discover the New Mathematics ( 1970) to best-selling success.
A lasting achievement of the "new math " is, for example, the early introduction of the concept of function in the teaching of middle school. Further innovations, such as the treatment group and body axioms were withdrawn after a few years.
The most spectacular innovation was to open up the teaching of mathematics in elementary school no longer with counting and calculating, but with naive set theory. The aim was, in addition to numeracy to promote logical thinking and the ability to abstract the children. For this, the set theory was didactically reduced to pie charts whose elements were colorful plastic plates, the so-called " logic blocks ", with different properties. However, this reform was opposed by parents and teachers and was abolished after a few years.
Reason for the introduction was a study that stated that students who had voluntarily taught in set theory, better overall performance in mathematics have shown. However, it turned out that this study had formal errors, which helped to make reform irreversible.