One Point Of View: Early-Teaching for Effective Numeracy
Both we and the children we now teach must come to terms over the next few decades with inventions that have potential for great progress or great harm. Everyone must live with these dilemmas but we in mathematics education are thrust to the forefront of them by four additional circumstances. First, technological advances require that at least a few tens of thousands of people be very well educated in mathematics. (Here and elsewhere I intend “mathematics” to include “statistics and computers.”) Second, middle-level mathematical capabilities are needed in the everyday occupations of millions more people now than would have been the case only a few decades ago. Third, much of the information served up by our modern world can only be properly examined by people with sound numerical intuition—comfort with things mathematical has become a condition of intelligent citizenship for millions of people. Fourth, universal availability in developed countries of very cheap calculators has suddenly and fundamentally altered what might be meant by numeracy, since essentially no one outside of school now chooses to use the calculation procedures which dominate elementary school mathematics instruction.