Overview

An era of sweeping cultural change in America, the postwar years saw the rise of beatniks and hippies, the birth of feminism, and the release of the first video game. It was also the era of new math. Introduced to US schools in the late 1950s and 1960s, the new math was a curricular answer to Cold War fears of American intellectual inadequacy. In the age of Sputnik and increasingly sophisticated technological systems and machines, math class came to be viewed as a crucial component of the education of intelligent, virtuous citizens who would be able to compete on a global scale. In this history, Christopher J. Phillips examines the rise and fall of the new math as a marker of the period's political and social ferment. Neither the new math curriculum designers nor its diverse legions of supporters concentrated on whether the new math would improve students' calculation ability. Rather, they felt the new math would train children to think in the right way, instilling in students a set of mental habits that might better prepare them to be citizens of modern society-a world of complex challenges, rapid technological change, and unforeseeable futures. While Phillips grounds his argument in shifting perceptions of intellectual discipline and the underlying nature of mathematical knowledge, he also touches on long-standing debates over the place and relevance of mathematics in liberal education. And in so doing, he explores the essence of what it means to be an intelligent American-by the numbers.

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In this history of the new math, Phillips reconstructs how techniques for teaching arithmetic, geometry, and algebra embedded at once professional views of the constitution of modern mathematics and social and political concerns of the Cold War era. Recovering debates that ranged from the grassroots to professional mathematicians and the National Science Foundation, this fascinating book demonstrates how both supporters and opponents of the new math believed that citizenship, democracy, and the social order depended not only on children learning mathematics, but how they learned it and how they thought about it. --Jamie Cohen-Cole, George Washington University author of The Open Mind: Cold War Politics and the Sciences of Human Nature

<i>The New Math</i>is ambitious, rich, and remarkably well-written. During the middle decades of the twentieth century, many groups struggled to articulate what mathematics is, what mathematicians actually do, and how a new approach to mathematics instruction could craft ideal citizens in America s schools. Mathematics teaching became a symbolic arena to sort out competing notions of proper thinking in the nuclear age.Drawing upon an impressive range of sources, Phillips vividly charts the surprising plasticity of mathematics among professional scholars and the voting public in Cold War America. --David Kaiser, MIT author of How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival

Author Information

Christopher J. Phillips is assistant professor in Carnegie Mellon University's Department of History.

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