The Reorganization Report of 1923
An appreciative understanding of the position and the program of mathematics in the modern American scheme of secondary education can best be had by viewing it against the backdrop of history. Its evolution from the stereotyped arithmetic of colonial days to the comprehensive and varied offering of today represents a continuing effort to make mathematics contribute all it could toward the achievement of the broad aims of prevailing educational philosophies, and many influences have been operative in shaping its course. The story of the evolving program of secondary mathematics has been fully and well recounted in numerous books and articles. It is not the purpose of this paper to tell the whole story again, but merely to indicate something of the contribution of one important committee, and especially of one of its members, to the development of the program in mathematics in the United States in the past quarter of a century. This committee was the National Committee on Mathematical Requirements, and the member of it to whom reference was made was the late Professor Raleigh Schorling, to whose memory this issue of The Mathematics Teacher is dedicated.