Tímarit um menntarannsóknir - 01.06.2012, Page 75

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Nýja stærðfræðin í barnaskólum
In the 1950s, questions arose in many
countries about mathematics teaching. An
international reform movement in mathe-
matics education had several origins, both
in the USA and Europe. Jerome Bruner
(1966) laid the ideological foundation of
the New Math movement in the United
States in his report The Process of Educa-
tion. During the 1950s several important
reform projects were launched. At the time
of the Sputnik Shock in 1957, nearly fully
developed reform programmes already
existed to respond to the national call for
improvement in mathematics and physics
education (Gjone, 1983).
At an international conference of math-
ematicians and school staff, arranged by
the OEEC in Royaumont, France, in 1959, a
decision was made to adhere to the policy
of Dieudonné, a spokesman for a French
group of mathematicians who wrote under
the pseudonym of Bourbaki. The Bourbak-
ists aimed at rewriting all mathematics in
a unified language of set theory and logic.
The conclusions of the conference were to
represent school mathematics by the sym-
bolic language of set theory and modern
algebra, to reduce teaching of classical de-
ductive geometry, and to implement sta-
tistics and probability (OEEC, 1961).
Following the Royaumont meeting,
the Nordic participants agreed upon or-
ganizing Nordic co-operation on reform
of mathematics teaching (Gjone, 1983).
Primary teacher Agnete Bundgaard was
leader of the primary school project. Bun-
dgaard and her collaborator wrote a series
of textbooks for ages 7–13, which later was
deemed as most orthodox adjustment to
the mathematicians’ demands (Høyrup,
1979).
New Math was implemented in Icelan-
dic schools at all levels in the 1960s. The
Bundgaard series was translated into Ice-
landic and first introduced to children in
Reykjavík in 1966. Its content was highly
theoretical. Numbers were introduced as
the quality of sets. The commutative, as-
sociative and distributive laws, even and
odd numbers, the zero in multiplication,
pairing numbers by a given function and
finding a function, Roman numerals and
place-value notation to the base five were
for example all introduced before the close
of the third grade, as well as prime num-
bers, permutation of three digits, and the
transverse sum and its relation to the nine
times table.
The new syllabus was introduced to
parents at meetings and by media articles
and interviews. Later, the experiment be-
came too voluminous to reach teachers
and parents. A television programme in
17 episodes by Guðmundur Arnlaugsson,
the main proponent of the reform in Ice-
land, was created for the purpose of infor-
mation, as well as several newspaper and
journal interviews. It is argued that the
information was presented by unrealistic
convictions about the value of the New
Math programme, that the timing of the
presentations was sub-optimal, and that
Abstract
Implementing “New Math” in Iceland – Informing
parents and the public