What Schools Forget
Two things we forgot: how schools should work, and how math should be taught.
We have traded things that worked for things that only look more efficient.
That’s the whole argument of this newsletter, told two ways.
Schools and Schooling traces how American education got here: one-room schoolhouses that outperformed the consolidated districts that replaced them, monitorial schools abandoned for reasons that had little to do with results, Horace Mann importing a Prussian system built to produce obedience, not thinkers.
Start here:
Teaching Math Rightly makes the same argument inside the math classroom. We rush kids into abstraction before they’ve earned it: fractions before ratios, the number line before number sense, “invert and multiply” before anyone asks why it works.
Start here:
Different subject matter, same mistake: we abandoned the slow path because the fast one looked better on paper.
Who’s writing this
I have a Master's in Applied Physics from Rice and a B.S. in Physics from Notre Dame, but in my first year of teaching, a 4th grader's long division problem stumped me cold. That gap between advanced math training and actually understanding how numbers work is why I stayed a teacher instead of pursuing a further degree, and it's the reason this newsletter exists. I now teach math, science, Latin, and woodworking at a liberal arts middle school, which is really just a chance to watch the same principle play out across four different subjects. I've taught everything from 5th grade math to algebra and geometry, and I've been teaching Euclid's Elements for about a decade. My articles have appeared in the CiRCE Institute's Forma Journal, Public Discourse, the Australian Classical Education Society, and elsewhere.
What you get
Free subscribers get the full weekly newsletter, including every history piece, every math pedagogy piece, no exceptions.
Paid subscribers also get curated collections of forgotten educational sources, and early access to my e-book, Euclid in Color, a full-color edition of Book I of the Elements.
If you’re a teacher, a parent, or just someone who thinks we got some of this badly wrong, you’re in the right place.
