Against Algebra

Meanwhile, mathematics remains the only academic discipline that is universally taught without anyone having agreed on what it’s supposed to be, which leads to some truly bizarre consequences. For example, many mathematicians have spoken about their feeling of having been self-taught. In light of the prominent role of math in the curriculum, this i

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It's not just that students know less than experts; it's also that what they know is organized differently in their memory. Expert scientists did not think like experts-in-training when they started out. They thought like novices. In truth, no one thinks like a scientist or a historian without a great deal of training. This conclusion doesn't mean

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Few people know very much about why schools exist as they do today; the intellectual traditions that have shaped education seem to be invisible to most observers. This is a strange gap in the knowledge of the public. With physics, most informed laypeople could write a coherent sentence or two about Einstein and Newton. For biology, a page might be

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In traditional learning methods, some kids struggle to make the connection between what they learn and real-world problems

education has largely stopped serving its primary purpose, preparing young people to thrive and giving them the skills and the hunger to continue a lifelong journey of learning.