Re: Dumbing down, dumbing up?

From: Herman Rubin (hrubin_at_odds.stat.purdue.edu)
Date: 11/25/04 

Date: 25 Nov 2004 15:08:34 -0500

In article <30lor4F2v6p9hU1@uni-berlin.de>,
Mitch Harris <harrisq@tcs.inf.tu-dresden.de> wrote:
>Gerry Myerson wrote:

>> There used to be something called Talented Students' Day here in Sydney.
>> The best high school students in the area would gather for a day of
>> lectures on interesting topics by local university math staff. One year
>> I gave a talk on orders of infinity, starting from scratch and ending up
>> with the independence of the Continuum Hypothesis (not the proof, to be
>> sure, just a general idea of what was at stake). When the evaluations
>> came in the main complaint was that they already knew most of this stuff
>> and wished I had gone a little faster.

>So what's going on here? There are constant barrages of anecdotes
>about how stupid kids are these days. Aren't more and more highschool
>kids taking the Calculus AP exam or college level classes?

> http://www.maa.org/features/dualenrollment.html

More are, but fewer are taking real mathematics courses.

The old-fashioned Euclidean geometry course, emphasizing
proofs, was mathematics. So was induction in the old
"college algebra" course. There was little additional
mathematics in the old program until rigorous analysis
or algebra was introduced. On this, nothing has changed.

All of the computation courses, given without any theory
foundation, are not real mathematics courses. Honors
students may still be taught axiom-theorem-proof mathematics,
and computational procedures based on that theoretical
background, but the proportion of college entrants who
have had some rigorous mathematics has dropped from almost
all to very few. 

-- 
This address is for information only.  I do not claim that these views
are those of the Statistics Department or of Purdue University.
Herman Rubin, Department of Statistics, Purdue University
hrubin@stat.purdue.edu         Phone: (765)494-6054   FAX: (765)494-0558

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