[Published in Two Papers on Academic Change, Occasional
Paper No. 11 of The Education Research Center, MIT]
Editorial notes: I first learned of this paper from Tom Dick (Oregon State University), who gave a talk on it at the Ninth International Conference on Technology in Collegiate Mathematics (Reno, Nov. 1996). Tom was working from a 1971 draft that did not identify the authors, and he had not been able to find out if it had ever been published. (The MIT Education Research Center no longer exists.) As luck would have it, I have been serving on the National Advisory Panel for the Activity Based Physics Project, and the chair of that panel is Edwin Taylor. When I showed him a xerox of Tom's draft, he recognized it immediately and tracked down for me a copy of the published version, which bears a 1972 MIT copyright. It is reproduced here with Ed's blessing.
What was striking to Tom and to all his listeners in Reno was how closely this paper identifies -- 25 years ahead of time -- the difficulties being encountered right now by everyone trying to reform mathematics education. We have also rediscovered some of the tactics described here for overcoming those difficulties. Could we have saved time, effort, and grief if this paper had been better known? I'll let you be the judge.
Note that the title of the published document refers to "two papers." The second is a 1908 paper by F. M. Cornford of Cambridge University, Microcosmographia Academica -- Being a Guide for the Young Academic Politician. What was striking to Ed Taylor and his colleagues in the early 70's was how little things had changed in this century. "The more things change, the more they stay the same." DAS
Last modified: July 3, 1997