Weeding and Sowing: Preface to a Science of Mathematical Education / Edition 1

by Hans Freudenthal

Overview

A title that sounds like poetry, and a subtitle that seems to contradict the title! But the subtitle is right, and originally it was just the title. A strange subtitle, isn’t it? Preface to a Science of Mathematical Education. All sciences – in their prenatal stage – have known this kind of literature: only the term used was not ‘Preface’, but, for instance, ‘Prolegomena’, which * means the same though it sounds less provisional. In fact such works were thicker than the present one, by up to ten times. There is much more that can be said about a science before it comes into being than after; with the first results comes modesty. This is the preface to a book that will never be written: not by me, nor by anybody else. Once a science of mathematical education exists, it will get the preface it deserves. Nevertheless this preface – or what for honesty’s sake I have labelled so – must fulfil a function: the function of accelerating the birth of a science of mathematical education, which isseriously impeded by the unfounded view that such already exists. Against this view I have to argue: it rests on a wrong estimation – both over and under estimation at the same time – of what is to be considered as science.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9789027710727
Publisher:	Springer Netherlands
Publication date:	02/29/1980
Edition description:	1978
Pages:	314
Product dimensions:	8.27(w) x 11.69(h) x 0.24(d)

Table of Contents

What Is Science?.- On Education.- On a Science of Education.- A Science of Mathematical Education.